The Simurgh's Son
by Darth Marrs
Summary: The world first saw Harry Bailey in a photo kneeling on a road before the Endbringer the Simurgh. The Simurgh's psychic scream drove entire cities mad. In Harry, it woke something else entirely. He never told the heroes what happened. After all, how could a young boy explain memories he could not possibly have, of a powerful, ancient sorcerer from a universe that preceded his own?
1. Genesis: Prologue

**Simurgh's Son**

A Harry Potter/Worm Crossover

By Darth Marrs

 **Genesis: Prologue**

Harry James Bailey was eight years old when the Simurgh attacked the London metropolitan area.

He remembered it being a perfectly normal Tuesday, just after dinner. School was still out for summer and he'd spent the day with his grandparents, but was back home for shepherd's pie, his favorite.

After a filling dinner, he had his bath before coming back down to watch the telly until his bedtime, snuggled between his parents. His daddy, James Bailey, was a detective constable with the Met. He still wore his uniform shirt, though he'd removed his jacket and belt, which Harry thought made him look quite sharp and authoritative.

His mum sat for chemistry at University College London. She wasn't watching the telly—she was reading from a great tome of a book that looked like it weighed almost as much as Harry. She had a clever little lap desk on which she held her notebook. Occasionally she'd blow a coppery strand of hair from her face while jotting down notes from her book.

Even if she wasn't paying attention, she was there, snuggled up to Harry's side. He didn't even care that the lap desk dug into his thigh a little. He thought that between his parents, he was the safest boy in the world.

He didn't understand what the distant sirens meant when they first began. For that matter, neither did his mum. She looked up, a confused look on her face. "Jimmy, what's that?"

A moment later, the TV channel went out. Words that said, "Signal Lost" floated across the screen.

Daddy paled to a shade of chalk. He shoved his glasses back up his long nose but spoke slowly and with forced calm. "Lily, go upstairs and grab the emergency bags. Grab Harry's too, I'll get the car."

"James?" Now his mum sounded worried.

"There's only one reason they'd set off the new sirens," Daddy said, a little more urgently. "Go, now!"

"Oh Blessed Mary!" Mum jumped from the couch and ran to the stairs.

Harry felt too confused and scared to say much of anything. "Harry, go upstairs and get dressed, we're going to go see your Nana and Papa, okay?"

"Daddy, what's going on?"

"Go, Harry. Go!"

Harry went, running just as fast as his mother. In his room, he ripped off his short summer pajamas and pulled on a pair of trousers and a pullover. He was just pulling on his shoes when his mum ran by his room laden with two large satchels. "Come on, Harry, to the car, love!"

She had her scared-but-trying-not-to-let-Harry-know voice. He'd heard it before, during a riot in London, and again when one of dad's prisoners threatened to kill them.

He ran after her and soon caught up. They rushed out of the front of the house to find Harry's dad already in the car with the trunk open. Up and down Merrilands Rd, where they lived, he saw other people spilling out of their houses and climbing into their cars as fast as they could. He started toward the door when he heard a distant, faint drone, almost like someone screaming, followed by a massive explosion that set off car alarms up and down the street and even caused Mr. Khan's windows to shatter two houses down.

"Harry, get in!" Lily shouted.

Harry climbed into the back as she rushed to the passenger side. In seconds, they were speeding down the street. Despite being a detective constable, James flew through the stop signs, both at Delacombe Avenue and then again at Dorchester Rd. Harry caught a brief glimpse of his school before they sped away, heading southwest from London. There were a lot of other cars coming after them.

"Daddy, Nana and Papa live the other way!" Harry shouted.

"We know, love, we just have to take a different route," Lily said.

Harry watched a lot of telly, and his Daddy loved to take him to the cinema every chance they could go. He'd seen lots of films where the adults were scared and the kids just made it worse by screaming or carrying on. He wasn't one of those kids, though. He trusted his Daddy with the wholesale faith only an eight year old could muster. Even if his Daddy wasn't the best Daddy in the world (which he was, thank you very much), he was a Detective Constable with the Met. There wasn't anything he couldn't do.

So, despite being scared and wanting very much to cry, Harry instead huddled quietly in the back seat and watched Daddy drive while Mum tried calling Nana on their large mobile phone. "No signal," she said.

Daddy flipped on the radio. "… _Radio 4. The London Metropolitan area has been attacked by the Endbringer Simurgh. Communications have been severely disrupted. The attack is on-going, therefore the number of casualties and the extent of the damage are not yet known_."

"Mary mother of God," Lily whispered. "Is it going to be like Lausanne?"

Harry didn't know what Simurgh or Lousanne was, but he understood what an Endbringer was. He'd seen pictures of New York and Moscow after Endbringer attacks from school, and knew they occurred now two or three times a year.

The dull drone in the back of his head got louder, making him want to scratch the back of his neck. He saw his Daddy gripping the wheel so hard his knuckles were white. "Jimmy, look out!" Mum cried.

The car swerved so violently Harry tumbled into the foot well of the back seat. He heard Daddy cursing under his breath, sounding almost as angry as the time Sean Black got the chief position over him.

Harry picked himself up from the foot well and looked out the back window while the radio continued to broadcast emergency evacuation orders. The eastern horizon looked orange with the late evening's sunlight shining through great clouds of dust and smoke in the air.

What caught his eye, though, was a glowing orb of light that seemed to be getting larger as he watched. Buildings floated around it, some as small as houses, some as large as office towers. He felt a surge of fear when he looked at the light, despite the fact that superheroes had arrived and were fighting the Endbringer. They were too far away for Harry to see who was fighting, but he could see bright flashes of laser fire, so he assumed Legend was probably one of them. Maybe Eidolon. He thought Legend was the most awesome of the heroes, though.

The droning sound in the back of Harry's mind grew louder and louder with each passing moment. He was distantly aware of the fact that Mum was shouting something at Daddy, but it was difficult to understand or concentrate with that droning sound. He heard undertones in it, and a faint hint of a melody that made him strain even harder to hear, as if that melody was the most important thing he'd ever listened too.

 _Morning sunlight shone through a broad window overlooking a breathtaking scene of a lake surrounded by mountains with rings of forests on their slopes. He sat at an oak table, an empty plate in front of him, and across from him he saw a woman perhaps his mother's age. She had long, frizzy brunette hair that hung loose and wild around her face. She wore a crimson sports jersey of some kind, with a great stylized lion on it that was three sizes too big. She was leaning forward, both hands clasped possessively on a cup of coffee or black tea, he couldn't tell which._

 _Despite looking frazzled and tired, she glanced up at him and smiled. It was a familiar smile, a gentle smile. It was a smile he saw Mum sometimes give Daddy when they were huddled on the couch together watching Telly. He didn't know her; had never seen her before, and yet his heart swelled so much with longing he felt tears in his eyes and found it difficult to breath._

"…that slut. Don't even try to deny it, James Charles Bailey!"

"God damn it, Lils, we weren't even dating, why the fuck do you even care? And don't think I forgot about you and Sean! We were dating when you slept with my best-fucking-friend!"

Harry blinked. The drone in the back of his mind seemed louder, more persistent. It made his eyes ache and his ears throb. He sat up in alarm when he realized Mum and Daddy were fighting— _really_ fighting. Mum's hands were flinging around wildly while she screamed, and Dad was pounding the wheel while shouting right back.

However, what really worried Harry was that they were still driving. They were driving really, really fast.

 _Seat belt, love._

Harry's hands latched the seatbelt across his waist without even thinking about the voice that, at least momentarily, cut out the constant droning in his head.

He craned his neck to look out the back again; the orb of light looked closer. He could see the faint hint of what almost looked like wings, but wings arrayed in a way that not only didn't make sense, but seemed to make his headache worse if he tried figuring it out. The drone shifted abruptly to a loud, piercing scream, and once again Harry was somewhere else.

 _Heavy stone walls surrounded him; a room in a castle, with the breathtaking view of the lake outside a window behind him. A cluttered desk sat in front of him, and on the desk a great stone bowl. Within the bowl, he saw a silver figure. It was the woman from his first vision, but older, worn and tired._

 _Bloody. Her lip had been split and she had a black eye that ran down to her cheek. Her hair was matted with blood and she looked barely able to stand. Harry didn't understand who or what she was, or why his heart thudded with a sudden flush of fear, rage and horror. The feelings grew unbearable when a gun appeared within the bowl, only a foot away from the figure._

 _She turned to face the gun directly, closing her eyes a moment before the weapon fired. The image burned away in a flash of fire and the sound of man screaming._

The screaming was real; it was his Daddy, shouting at Mum that he ought to break her neck for sleeping with Sean Black.

Mum screamed back, "Jimmy, LOOK OUT!"

Harry looked between their seats as a house—an actual house—fell from the sky onto the street in front of them. Daddy cried out in alarm as he spun on the wheel. They were going so fast, there was no possibility of breaking. Momentum overcame mass; the car spun off its tires in a roll.

Glass shattered; mum screamed. Daddy cried out. The world spun in a stomach-churning kaleidoscope of color and motion. The seat belt dug cruelly into Harry's waist as his arms and legs flailed about helplessly. Shattered glass sprayed against his head, arms and neck as the car rolled until it came to an abrupt, shocking halt.

Harry hung sideways from the belt. With shaking fingers, he undid the latch and fell against the door below him in the side-ways auto. "Mummy?" he whimpered. "Daddy?"

He forced himself to stand up on the door, his height easily fitting within the side-ways auto. He stared at the front and saw blood. He saw sheered-off, ragged beams of wood from the fallen house impaling his mum through her stomach like a giant push pin, keeping her in her chair even as her whole body hung at an odd angle, her arms, head and hair all dripping blood. The tip of the wood poked out the back of the fabric of her seat, covered in red. She didn't move; he couldn't even see her chest moving. A glance at his Dad showed a crushed mass of flesh—he couldn't even identify it as his Daddy, though a part of him knew it was.

The singing was so loud it felt as if it might make his bones shake apart. He stared at the bloody, shattered remnants of his world, and once again found himself somewhere else.

 _A little girl, barely a toddler, sat on his lap. She had angelic white-blond hair but sparkling green eyes that looked almost like his did in the mirror. "Got a secret," she whispered._

" _Tell me." His voice in his odd vision sounded older._

" _You aren't who you think you are," the toddler said._

" _Who am I, then?"_

" _You are Forever."_

He fell from the car, tumbling down from the passenger side where he'd climbed out without even realizing it. The road was littered with pieces of wood, plaster and crashed cars. There were people, but there were also monsters running about in the increasing gloom of dusk. The monsters screamed and attacked each other, themselves or the people around him. Extra limbs, long necks, animal faces or metal skin, the monsters moved about as if they were as shocked to be there as those they attacked. The people did the same, shouting and screaming and running around with cricket bats or beams of wood where they struck each other.

Not everyone was affected. Harry saw a father running with a child in his arms, and a mother on the other side of the road herding two older kids away from the fallen house.

Harry hurt badly, but the pain felt distant and obscure. Familiar, in an odd sense. Though he'd never been hurt so badly in his life, for some reason a part of his mind dismissed the pain. " _I've been hurt worse._ "

His knees gave out and he fell painfully to the asphalt of the road. The gloom receded before a brilliant, painful light, while the singing grew so loud the hairs on his arms stood on end and his chest felt as if it were being squeezed in a vice. He looked up and saw HER, floating in the air and looking directly down at him.

She should have been beautiful, Harry thought distantly. It looked as if a healthy, beautiful woman had been bleached of all color and then stretched out to three times her height, until she became almost skeleton thin. And yet she wasn't skeletal at all—her skin looked smooth and silver, without a trace of bones beneath. Platinum hair blew in a non-existent wind to frame a thin, sharp face and wide, empty white eyes that stared directly down at him.

Pure, pristine white wings surrounded her, sprouting not just from her bare back, but from her naked arms, legs, thighs and even each other. Some were smaller than his hand, some as large as his house. They moved randomly about, and with each movement one of the many floating houses, trollies or office buildings moved as well. Each movement was perfectly timed to block an incoming attack from the many capes who were, even at that moment, attacking her.

Her mouth was open, and the singing burned out of her, causing the air in front of her to shimmer. She was singing to him alone, now. She was singing _at_ him alone.

 _He was somewhere else. He didn't stand, because there was nothing to stand on. All around him he saw brilliant, scintillating waves of light, of colors he could not even begin to describe because the human eye was never meant to see them. Energy beyond human comprehension swirled around and through him. The light was life itself, the soul of the Universe and something no mortal being had ever seen, much less even conceived off._

 _Within this realm of brilliance flew luminescent beings. He could not look directly at them because to do so hurt his mind and made his skin feel as if he were sunburned, but from far enough away he caught glimpses of them moving about the continuum of brilliance. Some were the size of stars, others smaller than Harry himself. Size didn't matter, he realized, because it was an illusion. All that mattered was energy and life. The light of the continuum didn't just swirl around them, it fed from them and fed them, sustaining a nearly eternal symbiosis._

 _This place was more ancient than the stars themselves._

 _A streak of black fire ripped through the continuum of brilliance, slamming into a star-sized being. It ruptured, spilling shards of painful light all around. The other beings appeared around their fallen comrade, and Harry sensed a rage to destroy galaxies._

 _Another black beam ripped through the continuum. No, not black. A mere white—a streak of destructive energy that burned through the continuum, but was made less bright by the sheer brilliance of creation around it. Following the beam came a strange object, itself almost the size of a moon. It looked like a giant spinning top—a sphere with a large pillar rising from either end. It was from the nearest pillar that another white-black beam burned through the living light around him._

 _A being of light struck back, and something around the moon-sized craft flared as it deflected the energy. The moon-sized machine fire again, destroying yet another being of energy before itself succumbing to the counterattack._

 _Behind it came another moon-sized craft, and another. Five. Eight. A dozen. A hundred. Ten thousand. The huge craft came and fired their deadly weapons, and the beings of light gathered to destroy them. The scintillating light around Harry began to pulse, and in the back of his mind he heard a terrible screeching, as if the universe itself was crying in pain._

 _No ship could survive more than two blows from the light beings, but there were so many it didn't matter. These terrible, monstrous constructions burned away the beauty and the life, destroying the beings of light even as they were destroyed._

 _Harry wept as the Universe convulsed in agony around him as her first children died. One final shot proved too much, and the scintillating light collapsed in on itself, leaving only a single, wounded being of light, and a single monstrous craft drifting damaged in the dark._

 _He felt pain and rage pouring off that single, wounded being of light. Her light did not shine brilliant, but began to burn darker as the rage overcame her essence._

 _Suddenly Harry floated in the void of space, staring at a brilliant disk of light. It was the Milky Way, he realized._

 _Movement caught his eye. He watched, his mind numbed beyond understanding, as a globular cluster galaxy soared through empty space at speeds that defied reality itself. The outer spiral arms distorted under the conflicting gravitational forces as the smaller galaxy plowed directly into the larger one, as if thrown._

 _Throughout both, he saw millions of flares of light as stars and planets collided or were ripped apart by the unimaginable gravitational forces. Though he could not see her, he knew it was the sole surviving being of light that guided the smaller galaxy, ensuring the destruction of everything in its path. The two galaxies continued to collide, leaving massive swatches of destroyed stars in their wake, until the two supermassive black holes that formed the cores of each galaxy collided._

 _Space itself sundered apart. The explosion was so massive it swept aside not just solar systems, but whole galactic arms in a sea of primordial energy harking back to the origins of the universe billions of years ago. In his mind, a single foreign thought emerged:_ "My God. It was my fault."

~~Simurgh's Son~~

~~Simurgh's Son~~

Harry knelt on the cracked asphalt as the sun set over Surrey. Behind him, the auto that entombed his Mum and Dad was on fire, crushed up as it was against a collapsed house. Above him, a monster floated in an orb of light, shining like an angel not of Heaven, but of hell. She sang down at him, her terrible voice warping the minds of everyone within ten miles.

In the sky around her, desperate heroes tried to fight her off. Harry could see Alexandria herself punching through the many floating barriers the Simurgh created. Opposite her, Legend fired his lasers while Eidolon seemed to be using gravity itself.

She ignored their attacks and kept her empty white eyes on Harry as she sang.

The sound burned the air around him; it beat against not just his mind, but against his skin.

In his hands, which rested on his bent knees, he held an amulet that wasn't there a moment ago. It looked like something from a play—a circle of gold etched with tiny symbols he could not recognize surrounding an amethyst as large as his palm. The amethyst itself appeared to have been quartered by some precise chisel, with each quarter bearing a strange animal he couldn't quite make out in the gloom.

The Simurgh's song made the air shimmer. Almost of their own accord, his hands lifted the amulet up until it dangled by a golden chain that appeared as he held it. Harry put on the necklace and slipped the amulet under his shirt so it rested against his chest.

Immediately it began to burn, as if his chest was on fire. It didn't matter—he already hurt in so many places, and the song beat down on him so hard, what did this new, smaller pain matter? He bore the pain in silence as he looked up at the monster above him.

Simurgh's song suddenly changed to a loud, angry shriek. All the houses and buildings collapsed around her as she dove for him. Her long, clawed fingers reached down to rend the flesh from his body.

A grey missile struck her before she could reach Harry, slamming hero and monster alike through a petrol station on the side of the road. The other capes descended as well and began pummeling the Simurgh with every power they had. The screeching sounded more angry than hurt, but abruptly the Endbringer launched itself out of the petrol station, shooting upward in a flash of pristine white wings and lingering flame from the ignited petrol until she disappeared into the heavens.

The silence that followed throbbed in Harry's head almost as painfully as the Simurgh's singing had. He continued kneeling on the road as the heavy realization settled across his shoulders that he would never again sit on the couch, nestled between his mum and dad, to watch the telly. He jabbed a thumb into his thigh, trying to recall the feeling of mum's lap desk digging into his leg.

The tears came, streaming down his face. A great, racking sob stole his breath. He leaned over until his head rested on the cement and cried as memories floated through his mind of his Mum and Dad, but also of others he'd never met, and yet missed terribly anyway.

A gentle hand touched his shoulder. He tried to look up to see a man with a thick head of dark blond, windswept hair. He wore a mask that covered his eyes and cheekbones, while his body was covered in a tight blue suit decorated with what looked like white lightening. A heavy cape of the same material pooled around his feet where he knelt down beside Harry.

Harry knew the hero, of course. He had trading cards of the Triumvirate. This was Legend, who though perhaps not the most powerful was easily the most friendly. Hiccupping and sobbing, Harry said, "I think my mum and dad are dead."

Legend switched from kneeling to sitting cross-legged. Harry heard a _swish_ behind him and glanced back to see a gray streak fly up from the passenger side of his parents auto. He never saw Alexandria, but could guess from Legend's expression that she confirmed his parents were gone.

"I'm so sorry," Legend said. He spoke gently; kindly. "What's your name?"

"Harry."

"Harry, what's your last name?"

He opened his mouth to answer, but for some reason the answer didn't come as quickly as it should have. He should have said Bailey, because that was the name he was born with. It didn't sound right, though. "I'm not sure," he finally said.

The answer didn't actually seem to surprise Legend. "That's okay, Harry. I know you're scared, and I'm so very sorry for what has happened. If you stay here, though, you won't be safe. Would you come with me?"

Harry hiccupped and wiped his nose on the back of his arm. "Okay," he said softly.

"Legend, the protocols."

Harry glanced over Legend's shoulders and saw Eidolon himself floating nearby, a soft green light shining around the white mask that looked at him from within his hood.

"She went after this boy directly, Eidolon," Legend said. "She stopped singing and physically attacked him. She's never done that before. He must be important—too important to leave for the D.D.I.D. protocols. We'll hold him in quarantine for as long as we need, but we can't just leave him, my friend."

"You know what Alexandria would say."

"Then she should have stayed to say it." With that Legend stood and offered a sniffling Harry one gloved hand. Harry accepted it, and made no protest when he was easily lifted into the hero's arms, straddling his hip like he sometimes did with Mum when he was a baby.

He didn't make a sound when Legend lifted them both gently into the air. From his new vantage, and with the last light of the dying day, he saw the trail of destruction that had followed their car all the way from his house.

He sank his head into Legend's shoulders and wept again until he fell into a drained sleep filled with terrible, wondrous dreams of places that could never have existed, and people he didn't know and yet loved all the same.


	2. Genesis 1

A/N: I have created a new forum for this story, the link for which you can find on my profile. To make your reading as seamless as possible, I'll respond to reviews in that forum. It is interactive, and I welcome polite discussion. For this week, I also added some information over what readers can expect from this story. Thank you all for reading.

* * *

 **Genesis 1.1**

The on-board entertainment during the long plane ride over the ocean was, of all things, _The Golden Man_. Tired, nursing a bruise on his side given as a parting gift in London, Harry Bailey sat in a semi-vegetative state and watched the movie that chronicled the day the Earth changed.

He admired the fact that they didn't censor Scion's man-bits, but then again the Golden Cock was considered the epitome of man-bits, like the famous Greek and Roman statues that some religious zealots tried to cover with fig leaves, and others just blew up.

As far as Harry knew from his own intense study and interest, _The Golden Man_ was a faithful recreation of that paradigm-changing day in 1982 when a cruise-liner from Plymouth to Boston diverted course to investigate a long-haired, naked man with skin of burnished gold floating unaided a hundred feet over the water.

Sheila Peters played Melissa Hawke, a young cancer patient who was by her own admission heading back to Boston for an assisted suicide. Harry admired Sheila's coppery hair, gorgeous green eyes, and the fact she was not averse to nude scenes in many of her movies. (Harry had seen pictures of the real Melissa Hawk, who looked like someone he might meet at the laundromat. Not breathtaking, nor even strikingly beautiful, just cute in an everyday fashion that he would still absolutely love to jump into bed with if she weren't then in her forties.)

In the movie, just as in real life, after touching Scion she was completely cured. Her brother Andrew climbed onto the railing of the ship to touch Scion's hand. That same brother would become one of the first superheroes to emerge, and ironically, the first to die.

Who would have thought it? Super-powers didn't make people perfect, they just made the deaths more notable. Soon after Scion emerged, parahumans of every description started coming out of the woodwork like mad, villains and heroes alike, until various world governments had to step in and address the issue.

Then, just ten years after Scion graced the world with his golden man-bits, a forty-five foot tall rock-covered monster climbed up out of the center of an oil field in Iran. The monster could manipulate energy on a scale never imagined before, launching and controlling lightning and producing radiation as intense as that produced by a fission device at ground zero. Behemoth proclaimed himself to the world in a flurry of blood and fire. Soon after followed Leviathan from the seas, and Harry's personal favorite, the Simurgh from the heavens.

The world absolutely, deeply, sucked ass.

~~Simurgh's Son~~

~~Simurgh's Son~~

"Sir, it's time to wake up."

Harry wasn't asleep, but the pretty stewardess with the flawless milk-chocolate skin wouldn't have known that. He opened his eyes and pretended to yawn, catching a glimpse down her shirt as he did so. He was sixteen, she was gorgeous, and she left the top two buttons of her shirt undone. Sue him.

"We there already?"

"Sure are, sweetie," she said, flashing the most perfect teeth he'd ever seen.

And…then she was gone. He sighed sadly as, duty done, she moved on to any others who managed to sleep through the landing that ended the overnight crossing of the Atlantic. Despite the dread he felt in his chest for what was coming, and the lingering pain from his parting 'gift', Harry did sit up and look out the window at New York with interest.

The sun was fully over the ocean now, leaving good old England in the dark. Under this unfettered morning light he got his first good look at the new and improved New York City. In his world issues class back in Leicester, he'd read about how New York was one of only a handful of cities struck by Behemoth to actually rebuild. It was attacked in 1993, just nine years before Simurgh hit London.

"The world didn't understand what the Endbringers were," Mr. Singh had told the class in his perfectly enunciated, clipped Indo-English accent. "It had only been two years since Behemoth was sighted for the first time, and many still believed he was a parahuman. More importantly, New York was an important symbol of resilience for the Americans. There was never any question it would be rebuilt."

Harry knew from further reading and a plethora of witness and news videos that Behemoth actually appeared in Brighton Beach first. He rose up from the ground in what almost looked like a volcano in the middle of Coney Island and started working his way north, obliterating everything around him for miles around. The neighborhoods of Gravesend, Bensonhurst, Fort Hamilton, Dyker Heights, Mapleton and dozens more were levelled as the monster made his way toward Manhattan Island.

The heroes arrived when he reached and obliterated Sunset Park and fought him past Gowanus and Red Hook, into Brooklyn Heights and finally into Lower Manhattan. He made it all the way to Washington Square Park on Manhattan before Scion finally arrived to fight him off.

The fight took three hours. Five hundred capes took part in the fight, a hundred and ninety-two died and fifty more were severely injured. Despite evacuation attempts, almost two hundred thousand civilians died, including the city's mayor, who famously set up a staging area to try and personally oversee evacuations, but did so too close to the monster.

Since that time, there were twelve motion pictures and four television mini-series about the fall of New York, and one mini-series about its rebirth and the shifting of the financial heartbeat of the city from Manhattan to the newly rebuilt Brooklyn.

Coney Island was gone, but the old Gravesend neighborhood now housed the Dinkins Memorial International Airport, which gave a breath-taking view of the skyline of the new city. Skyscrapers touched the clouds in an array of futuristic arcs and spires, with Tinker and Thinker-inspired architecture, each one rising half a mile into the sky but surrounded by acres of parkland or community gardens. The decision was made to consolidate and reduce the human footprint while increasing greenspace, resulting in the most modern city in the world.

Harry would have loved to stay there and explore the place. He couldn't see it all from the airport, but he'd seen pictures of the memorial to those lost. It had become a tourist attraction world-wide for its somber, awe-inspiring architectural beauty. Instead, he was going to Brockton Bay, a city not even the bloody Yanks would want to rebuild, if everything he'd read was true.

He grabbed his satchel from the overhead bin, which contained everything he could claim as his own, and followed the last people out of the narrow seats of economy toward the door. He left the plane for a metal and plastic airbridge that led to the terminal. He'd been told that security wouldn't let family members into the gate area itself. They'd have to wait in the main terminal.

Somehow, though, he wasn't surprised to see his supposed "cousin" waiting for him with a pair of large men in black slacks and thick gray turtlenecks standing right behind him. What did surprise him, however, was the absence of protestors. Normally when he showed up at a new place, there were a few protestors shouting about letting a Simurgh-influenced person nearby.

His cousin, whom he'd never heard of until his previous "cousin" told him the day before (or was it two days? Time zones sucked) was a man of ordinary height but unusually slim build, with coarse black hair cut so close he could see a hint of his scalp. He was clean shaven, with a sharp, cleft chin and immaculately trimmed eyebrows that would have been thick and bushy otherwise. Most striking was that he wore the logo and badge of an assistant director of the Parahuman Response Team ENE on his slate gray turtleneck. His two companions didn't wear any identifying logos on their black weave sweaters.

The man didn't smile when he saw Harry, but Harry didn't expect him to. Now that he saw his…cousin, he glanced at the two men until he felt a stinging song in the back of his mind while studying the dark one with the thick neck and a footballer's shoulders.

"Hello, Mr. Bailey," Thomas Calvert said. His thin lips curled into what could have been a smile, or a grimace. "I trust you had a good fight?"

"Splendid, cousin. Absolutely splendid," Harry said with forced cheer. "Bloody famished, though. Don't suppose we could catch a bite to eat before heading on North now, could we?"

"Of course," Calvert said coolly. "Would you prefer to eat here in the Airport?"

Harry didn't care. He was hungry—his last "cousin" didn't feed him before shoving him on the plane, and most certainly didn't pay for an on-flight meal. "Wherever's most convenient, Cousin."

Calver's lips lost all hint of humor, but he didn't frown or grimace. "Well, given that you are a sixteen-year-old in a growing body, I'll assume fast food will be sufficient?"

"Hell yes, Cousin. Huzzah!"

They stopped at a King Burger inside the main terminal and Calvert graciously purchased a triple-meat King Special with a fried egg and extra cheese on it, basket of waffle chips with cheddar sauce, and a tub of soda large enough to float the _Queen Elizabeth II_. The two men who remained standing behind Calvert appeared impressed when Harry laid into his meal with abandon.

He listened to the song of the airport; of automated messages in English, Spanish and of course Japanese. Leviathan's attack on Kyushu killed millions and literally broke the back not just of Japan's economy, but the physical island of Kyushu itself. No surprise, then, to find the Japanese among one of the largest immigrant populations in America. Thousands of people moved about their business, some running to catch flights or clinging to each other after a long separation.

He saw a pretty teenage half-Japanese girl walking by with her head down and earphones in. Looking at her, Harry heard a sharp voice sing a song of blades, bows and arrows.

He was nearly finished with his King Burger and making headway into his chips when Calvert laced his fingers together like a typical villain. "So, Mr. Bailey, do you understand your position with me?"

Harry shrugged and popped in a chip. He spoke with his mouth full and tried not to grin at Calvert's obvious distaste at his rude display. "Slave. Just like with Justinian, Colbert and Markos before him."

The two men behind Calvert said nothing, but Harry saw the cape one wince a little in his left eye.

"I prefer the term employee," Calvert said.

"That implies I had a choice," Harry said with a nonchalant shrug. "Never even heard of you until Justinian threw me on a plane. Don't know what you paid for me, but I hope you think it's worth it. Justinian said I wasn't worth what he paid Colbert for. Colbert just stole me and killed Markos, so he got me for free I suppose."

"You seem oddly content with your circumstances, Mr. Bailey," Calvert said.

Harry shrugged. "What am I supposed to do? Every time I ran away, the Queen's Men came because I was Simurgh-influenced. And of course we all know that Justinian and Colbert were both MPs. Good, upstanding Members of Parliament. You're a good, upstanding man too, aren't you, Cousin?"

"Quite." A thin lip curled slightly. "Do you know why I invited you to join me?"

Harry considered arguing that point about being "invited", but realized he was already pushing his new "cousin" a little far. He always did that the first day to try and gauge his limits. Markos was a hot-blooded, violent man. Colbert too. Justinian didn't care about anything but finding enemy capes or potential recruits and let Harry get away with everything short of escape.

Calvert, though, his song sounded cold, filled with ruthless deliberation and probabilities spun though the universe, with an odd echo he couldn't quite grasp. "You want me to find capes. Like your big black guy there. A song of…speed and destruction, like a ballistic missile. Or you yourself." He met Calvert's eyes but didn't describe what he felt of the man's power.

Calvert merely nodded. "Now let me ask you a question I doubt Mr. Justinian ever asked you, Mr. Bailey. What, exactly, do you want?"

Cold, deliberate. Smart. Calvert was a manipulator. Somehow, he always knew just what to say or do to get the best possible outcome. Harry lost this round before it even started, he realized. "To live," he finally said. "To have peace. Just quiet. No capes. No more songs."

Calvert studied him, and as Harry watched he felt a strange echoing sensation in the song Calvert caused. When the man spoke, he sounded as if all decisions had already been made. "Then let us enter a genuine agreement then, Mr. Bailey. I do not wish to own you so much as employ you. I offer you a wage of five thousand per month to be deposited into an account of your choosing. Upon reaching your eighteenth birthday, you will be entitled to the entirety of that account, and will be free to go."

"Until then?"

"Until then, you will work for me. Publically we'll maintain the fiction of my being your cousin. Just as you did with Justinian or Colbert, if you receive any inquiries from Legend or the Protectorate, you'll maintain the fiction that you're well cared for. In return, you will be. But most importantly, in a year and a half, you will be free with almost a hundred thousand dollars to do with as you please. To live as you please."

Given the man purchased Harry wholesale, it was a surprisingly generous offer. It was an offer that promised hope. For that reason, and because of the song Harry heard in the man, he knew for certainty that it was an outright lie.

"That sounds good, Mr. Calvert. Real good. I'll be glad to work for you."

Calvert didn't offer a hand. At first Harry thought it was because he wasn't worth it. Instead, the cape body guard smiled faintly and handed over a saniwipe.

His hands were greasy.

~~Simurgh's Son~~

~~Simurgh's Son~~

Harry wasn't sure what exactly would happen when they left the airport. He didn't have a phone or any other electronic devices, and couldn't remember his American geography to know for sure how long it took to get from New York to Brockton Bay. He assumed a few hours, but didn't know anything for sure.

Calvert led him to a black stretch limo and motioned for him to enter. The interior was disappointingly free of alcohol but he saw several rows of soda. He grabbed a can, amazed to find it cold despite sitting on an open shelf, and took a swig. The cape climbed in behind Calvert, while the other man drove.

"Your first and most important duty will be to inform PRT and welfare authorities that you are glad to be here and that I am treating you well. I trust this will be acceptable since, unless forced to do otherwise, I fully intend to treat you well."

Calvert seemed to really like his own voice. Harry just nodded—Justinian and Colbert required the same of him. The punishment for not cooperating was pretty bad—Harry still had burn scars on the inside of his thighs from Colbert the one time he tried to ask for help. He had acid burns on his back from Markos. Worse than that, though, was that the poor school counselor he'd asked for help was found dead, along with her husband and two young kids the next day.

Harry never asked for help again after that. He could handle pain, but the idea of innocent people dying because of an action he took made him physically ill for weeks.

"No problem," he said casually. He saw a dainty little jar of lightly salted cashews. He _loved_ cashews, and in a second had the jar opened and half empty.

"Jeez, kid, where are you putting all that?" the footballer cape asked.

Harry shrugged. "I'm a growing boy. And Justinian didn't feed me yesterday."

He was so busy with the cashews he didn't have a chance to study his environment until the limo came to a halt. He assumed traffic, until the door opened and the driver stepped aside. "This way, Mr. Bailey," Calvert said. "From this point on, I'll be referring to you as Harry. You'll refer to me as Thomas until our appointment is complete."

Not understanding but not willing to reveal his ignorance, Harry finished off the last of the cashews and left the empty jar in the seat and the empty soda can on the floor as he climbed out with his satchel.

Outside, he blinked in shock.

The New York Protectorate Headquarters rose from a self-contained island just off Brooklyn's coast, connected by a series of retractable bridges. Ten stories of glass and steel rose in a beautiful twisting spire, with balconies that projected out along each twist, like the fins of a fish in the act of swimming to the sky. The air around the whole structure glistened with an opaque force field.

Four large helipads jutted out like the leaves of a clover from the very top of the structure.

Harry didn't bother to voice his questions. Instead, he just followed Calvert down the sidewalk, framed by gardens buried under a thin layer of snow. He shivered in the cold as they walked.

He noticed immediately that they were not approaching a public entrance. The public entrance of the PRT New York was a glass lobby two stories high decorated with framed portraits of every Protectorate and Ward member to die in the line of duty. He knew because he'd watched every documentary on it out there. Instead, they were heading down a gentle sloping sidewalk parallel to a driveway that led to a subterranean garage.

Set in the wall between double steel doors and a closed steel garage door, several armed men in PRT uniforms stepped out of a security office. The man who signaled to them had only a sidearm. The two men behind him had what looked like tinker tech rifles that could have fired anything from bullets to barracudas, for all Harry knew.

"IDs, please," the man said.

Calvert showed his badge. The other two men removed badges that had the word "CONTRACTOR" in red ink.

"Er, sorry, don't have any ID," Harry said with a shrug.

"Harry Bailey is registered as a guest," Calvert said calmly to the agent. "His status was approved by Assistant Director Tagg. I will personally vouch that this young man is Harry Bailey."

The agent nodded and pointed to an X inlaid in yellow tiles in the cement. "Please stand here, Mr. Bailey." Harry did as instructed and then flashed his biggest, goofiest grin with a thumb's up just as the camera flashed.

Behind him, the black cape covered his mouth. Calvert didn't look impressed, nor did the security agents. "Mr. Bailey, we'll take as many photos as necessary to get one acceptable for security," the agent said. He sounded bored. "This'll take one minute or thirty, your call."

"Can I have that one?" Harry asked.

The agent rolled his eyes. "No."

Harry stuck out his tongue. "You're a right tight-arse, aren't you? Fine." He snapped to attention and assumed the most serious expression he could.

The camera flashed and a badge appeared from the lamination machine just seconds later, which the agent personally attacked to his shirt. He didn't say a word.

"So, does this mean I can go eat with the Wards?" Harry asked.

"No," Calvert said as he led the way through the steel door.

"How 'bout the Protectorate members?"

"No."

"The…"

"Harry, enough," Calvert said.

Harry made a show of pouting as he followed Calvert into a wide hall. On this side of the door, he could see that the security outpost was much larger inside than appeared at first, extending several hundred feet with glass walls giving the agents within easy views of both the garage and the hallway that ran parallel to it. He couldn't help but notice how many of the dozen or so agents within watched his every step. None looked particularly friendly.

They arrived at a bank of elevators and Calvert led them into the first one available. The elevator shot up and then began moving at an angle. They cleared the shaft walls and Harry turned to gape at the snowy splendor of New Brooklyn. The elevator was speeding up one of the outward "fins" of the building itself. "Okay, that's pretty cool," Harry admitted.

The cape bodyguard nodded but didn't say anything. Harry began to suspect he was the only one in the elevator besides Harry himself who had a soul. The other guard could have been more machine than man, judging by his absolutely blank face and rigid posture. Harry kept waiting for the man to speak to see if he had a thick Austrian accent.

The elevator slowed to a halt. The doors opened to reveal a whole floor filled with winter sunlight from skylights overhead. The space was wide open at first glance. Only at the second glance did he realize that all the walls were made of a glass so perfectly opaque that they looked almost invisible except at an angle that caught the light. It appeared to be a space filled with conference rooms and even an auditorium.

Standing a few hundred feet away, resplendent in a deep blue costume lined with lightening and a blue domino mask, stood Legend.

Harry stumbled a little, surprised to see the man who didn't just help save him from the Simurgh, but who was largely responsible for him not being killed after. No one liked talking about the DDID protocols, but Harry knew just from living with villains that the older protocols meant everything influenced by the Simurgh was killed.

Even if his parents had lived, Harry knew they would still have been shot. All those in London hit by the Simurgh were. The protocols were different now, but that didn't change the fact that Harry would be dead save for the man in front of him.

Legend still had his windswept hair. Harry wondered if he'd just flown in. He stepped forward and smiled in such a gentle fashion it made Harry feel small and way too young. "Harry Bailey," the superhero said. He took Harry's shoulders in his gloved hands and looked him over. He had blue eyes, Harry saw. Just like his costume. "It's been too long. Seven years?"

"I think so, sir," Harry said.

"How have you been?"

 _Enslaved. Beaten and abused, starved and forced to help villains find and murder enemy capes. How are you?_ "I've been good, sir. I'm real excited to be here. Thomas got me a King Burger in the airport, and even cheddar chips."

"A triple-meat King Burger with a fried egg on top." It took effort for Harry not to whip his head around to see if it was the same man speaking. Thomas Calvert sounded warm, friendly and utterly different than the man who met him at the airport. "I've never actually seen someone eat something like that and still be able to walk after."

Legend laughed—a free, happy sound. "Harry always did have an appetite. Come on, we have refreshments waiting."

He led them through the glass walls into a wide conference room. Harry realized immediately that the glass walls were an optical trick of some kind because the room which looked empty through the glass wall in fact held several people. Legend did the introductions. "Harry, I'd like you to meet Director Rebecca Costa-Brown, the civilian director of the Protectorate."

Harry shook the Latino woman's hand and forced a humble smile to cover the sharp pain of a powerful song in his head. This woman was no more a civilian than Calvert was—she was one of the most powerful capes he'd ever been around, other than Legend himself. "An honor, ma'am," he said.

"A pleasure as well," she said. She sounded cool, but not unkind. Just very, very…competent.

"Next to her is Senator Warren Stillwater of New Hampshire."

A tall, older black man with a white beard and a shaved head. He had broad shoulders but a bulging stomach. His grip was strong though, almost painfully so. "Mr. Bailey," he said in a deep, beautiful baritone. He had no song of power, but Harry didn't need an echo of the Simurgh to know the man must have been an eloquent and charismatic speaker. Just the introduction made him want to vote for the senator—if he weren't an underage foreign national slave to supervillains, that was.

"Finally, this is Assistant Director Joanna Holstier with the New Hampshire Child Protective Services," Legend said.

Next to a member of the Triumvirate, the director of the Protectorate and a US Senator, a state agency employee should have been somewhat humbled. Instead, she looked tired and overworked in her off-the rack pantsuit. "Mr. Bailey," she said curtly.

"Er, it's a pleasure to meet you," Harry said. "Not sure why, though. I mean, I'm not…"

"I had to call in some favors to get you into my custody, Harry," Calvert said. Again, he sounded warm, friendly and utterly alien to the man he met in the airport. "Your history was working against us. If not for Legend's intervention, you'd have still been back in England."

It was so hard not to let his confusion show. Legend looked very pleased with himself, though. "I've known Thomas for several years, but more importantly, I knew your situation in England was not ideal. There were some concerns here in the States, but I think you've demonstrated that you're not a continuing threat. I leaped at the chance to help secure a better home for you, and fortunately Senator Stillwater here agreed to sponsor your visa."

 _He didn't know._ The realization sickened and angered Harry, though he made sure to keep the feelings in the back of his mind. Legend honestly thought he was doing a good thing. He had no idea the utter hell that had been Harry's life since he turned twelve, and a local supervillain realized he could detect capes.

He saw Director Costa-Brown staring at him so pretended to blush and look down. "I really appreciate it, sir," he said. "I think I'm going to be happy here."

If nothing else, he'd become really good at lying.

"Well, let's get started shall we?" It was the state bureaucrat, Holstier, who broke the silence. "Mr. Bailey, since you are now sixteen you do have a say in your placement with…"

They settled around the table to begin the process of formalizing Thomas Calvert's control over his life.


	3. Genesis 2

A/N: Previous chapter review responses and comments are in my forums like normal. For those asking, the first few chapters are setting the stage. Things start getting interesting in chapter five. If you can make it until then, you'll see. If it's just too excruciating for you to read, I certainly understand.

* * *

 **Genesis 1.2**

"You did very well, Mr. Bailey," Calvert said.

Harry nodded but was too busy looking out the window of the helicopter to give a damn. He was in a _helicopter!_ He was in a jet-propelled PRT helicopter, flying over dense streams of traffic between New York and wherever the hell they were.

Calvert must have realized everything else was irrelevant. Harry sat on the edge of his seat, watching the land fly by underneath him in a near solid stream of humanity. What surprised him were the long stretches of greenery. He'd assumed it was just one big metropolitan area, but it wasn't like that at all.

They came within sight of the ocean soon. They were flying to Brockton Bay in the most direct route, so most of it was overland. His first sight of his new home left a lot to be desired.

There were a few skyscrapers in the heart of the city, and what looked like a handful of nice neighborhoods, but most of the sprawling city seemed composed of tightly packed neighborhoods. Other than one or two parks, he saw hardly any greenspace. What he did see were dilapidated, empty piers and ports, and a large part of the bay obstructed by what looked like sunken boats.

 _What a dump._

Then he saw the Protectorate Headquarters in the middle of the Bay. It rose out of the water just like an oil rig, but an oil rig with beautiful architecture surrounded by force fields and defensive missile placements. While not as beautiful as the New York PHQ, it was still a stand-out in Brockton Bay. The Rig was a testament, he knew from his reading, to the disproportionate number of capes in the mid-sized city. Brockton Bay actually had more capes per capita than Los Angeles or Houston.

Of course, most of them were villains.

He wondered and even hoped they were going to land there, but instead the helicopter continued toward downtown.

There was no party waiting for them at the much smaller PRT East North East Headquarters, which after the glory of New York looked like a remarkably ordinary steel and glass high rise with the letters P.R.T. and a large glass dome on top as it's only distinguishing feature.

Rather than a fancy pad on the roof, the helicopter landed on a helipad between the building and the water's edge, set amidst a garden furrowed for winter. Even with Endbringer-enhanced global warming, it still snowed in New Hampshire in winter.

No one met them from the PRT, just a limo to drive them wherever they were going. The view from the ground frankly wasn't much better than from the air.

"Given you're…unique perceptions, you present something of a quandary," Calvert said as soon as their limo started driving through the start-and-stop traffic of afternoon rush hour. "It is a serious crime to reveal the civilian identity of a cape, even if they are a villain. Doing so brings not only severe legal repercussions, but usually immediate and draconian retaliation on the part of the entire Cape Community.

 _Who actually says Draconian?_ "I understand."

"I say this because you are going to likely learn the civilian identities of several capes in my employ. While I will create the pretense of you living with my civilian self, in truth you'll be housed in other facilities more suited to my off-duty interests. You understand that should you reveal anything you discover, not only will the terms of our agreement be broken, you will be killed."

It was the first time Calvert explicitly made a threat to Harry's life since he landed. It had been almost eight hours. Justinian made his first threat after just five minutes. "I understand. I keep my mouth shut."

"Excellent." He then dismissed Harry entirely and looked down at a smartphone.

The cape beside Harry leaned over and offered a hand. "Luke," he said. "Luke Casseus."

Harry accepted the hand. "Harry, nice to meet you. Striker, right?"

Calvert didn't glance up, but Harry noted from the corner of his eye the man make a note on his phone with a small stylus.

"That's right. Go by Ballistic. How do you know?"

Harry shrugged. "The Simurgh still sings to me whenever I'm around capes. Gets pretty irritating if you ask me. I can usually tell from the song what the cape can do."

Luke stared at him a moment, a small flicker of horror shone in his eyes before he forced it back. "That's some pretty serious shit. You okay?"

Harry shrugged. "We play the hand we're dealt. Who knows, maybe working for Mr. Calvert here will help my hand."

"From this point on, Mr. Bailey, you can refer to me either as Boss, or as Coil except in public."

 _Coil_. For some reason, Harry hated villains with snake motifs. "Will do, Mr. Coil."

~~Simurgh's Son~~

~~Simurgh's Son~~

"Holy shit, you live in a supervillain lair. That is so cool. Do you have a monorail? Tell me you have a monorail, because that would just be awesome."

Ballistic snorted back laughter while Coil pretended Harry hadn't said anything. _Awnold_ the Terminator Guard just looked blank. The limo parked in an enclosed garage on the second level, but they took a lift down to a subterranean staging area filled with soldiers, armored vehicles, crates filled with munitions, and everything you could ask in an evil lair.

Except a monorail.

"Damn," Harry muttered. "Colbert had a monorail."

"He took over an abandoned theme park, Mr. Bailey," Coil said. He didn't try to hide his impatience. "This isn't a theme park. Ballistic, please show Mr. Bailey to his apartment. You'll start Arcadia tomorrow. You'll receive a phone. I expect discreet pictures of every cape you encounter with a description of powers, preferably before winter break."

Harry snapped to attention and saluted. "Sir, yessir!" He then turned to Ballistic. "Hey, there anything to eat around here? I'm famished."

Ballistic roared laughter as he led Harry to a set of stairs leading up to the apartments.

~~Simurgh's Son~~

~~Simurgh's Son~~

Early the next morning, Harry blinked himself out of his memories to see a pretty blonde girl standing at his door in jeans and a black hoody with the Arcadia Supersonic's basketball team logo printed on it.

"Are you for me?" he said with a suddenly bright, excited grin. "Perk of working for a supervillain, maybe? Coil didn't have to, but I'm thrilled to accept anyway."

She scowled at him, but he suspected she was laughing at the inside. "I'm taking you to school, Perv."

He made a show of putting his hands in the pockets of the brand new jeans he found in his dorm room and scuffed the floor with the brand new $200 sneakers that fit his feet perfectly. "Will you hold my hand? First day, you know. I'm pretty shy."

This time he could see her start to lose the fight to contain a smile. "Luke said you were something. Name's Marissa."

Harry started to accept, but paused. This girl's song was so bright it burned. "Er, I won't get burned touching your hand, will I?"

She blinked at him, surprised. "No."

With that assurance, he grabbed her hands with both his. "So, how bout kissing? If I kiss you will I get burned?"

"No, only punched. In the face. Really hard."

"Might be worth it."

"I didn't say I was the one who would punch you. Luke is my friend."

"Er, don't want to kiss him. Or get punched." He shuddered as if either were horrible. Marissa rolled her eyes and led him out of his small apartment.

The Coil Evil Lair of Doom™ was as busy as ever with men purposefully stacking things.

"You know, I've always wondered about minions in evil bases. When they're not fighting or pillaging or whatnot, what do they actually do?" He wondered aloud. "I mean, think about it. Do you think they just move the same boxes around anytime Coil's nearby so it looks like they're working?"

From the corner of his eyes, he saw a couple of the soldiers glare at him. Marissa just shook her head. "They might hit you too."

Harry shrugged. "Eh, I get used to it."

She didn't say anything else until they reached the garage. Instead of the limo, they walked to an older-model sedan.

"Can I drive?"

"Do you know how?" she asked with one arched brow.

"This would be a good time to learn, right?"

She shook her head and climbed in behind the driver's seat. Harry got beside her and buckled up. "So, you're Sundancer, right?" he asked.

"Not dressed like this."

"Oh, right." He nodded and looked out the window as she backed out of the space and started driving.

"How old are you, Harry?"

"Sixteen. Be seventeen in July. You?"

"Seventeen for a month or two longer. Technically this is my senior year."

He nodded and glanced at her as she drove. She had a lovely neck and pale, classically porcelain skin. Her song, as brilliant and bright as it was, sounded…

"Are you a slave like me?" he blurted, despite a small part of his mind telling him to shut up.

"NO!" She turned and glared at him a moment before shaking her head. "And you're not a slave. Luke said you accepted a salary and you'll be gone by eighteen."

"Oh, right. Sorry. Just…you seem really, really sad. Not like, 'boo-hoo my dog died' sad. More like, 'my whole world is shit and there's nothing I can do about it' sad. Like me. Just… Yeah. Sorry. I'll shut up now."

"Please do," Marissa said heatedly.

After a few minutes of driving, she sighed. "Sorry. It's just…things are hard for my team. That's all."

"Okay, I get it," Harry said. "Know what helps me get over it?"

"What's that?"

"Sex. Let me know if you want to give it a try."

She snorted, shook her head, and then glared at him even as she smiled. "You have a one-track mind, don't you?"

"Er, I'm a repressed, enslaved sixteen year old boy. So sue me."

"No. Not now, not ever."

"Okay," Harry said. "So, this phone you're giving me, it has internet access right? And none of that net-Nanny crap, right?"

~~Simurgh's Son~~

~~Simurgh's Son~~

Within the first three hours of school, Harry had pictures, names and powers of every Ward in Arcadia. It should have been much harder, but the Wards hung out in a clique with Victoria and Amy Dallon, who were openly known as Glory Girl and Panacea. He'd never heard of them before.

However, the counselor's assistant volun _told_ to show him around made sure to tell him all about the beauteous, poetry-inducing brilliance of Glory Girl. And Panacea, the humble sister who could heal anyone of anything. But who wasn't Glory Girl, who was so beautiful and powerful that the sun shone only for her.

The poor kid appeared a little besotted.

But then he had a class with Glory Girl second period, and began to understand why. Imagine the most beautiful, stereotypical Swedish Bikini Team model, and then give her utterly unreasonable super powers and an aura that could reduce villains to putty and allies to…well, putty as well, and you had Glory Girl.

No wonder Panacea sat behind her sister, slouched with exhaustion and social neglect. She could have been a brilliant, happy person, and on one would be able to get past Glory Girl's power-induced awesomeness to ever know.

Naturally, Glory Girl surrounded herself with the best and brightest, which just happened to include pretty much every cape in the school. They didn't even try to be discreet, and Harry strongly suspected Coil already knew all about them.

Perhaps it was a test.

Regardless, he did his duty, took his pictures, and pretended to care about class when in fact he made more notes in his note book. Lunch was good, though. Coil gave him a near limitless lunch budget, and he tested that as much as he could. By the time Marissa joined him with a little turkey, lettuce and bacon wrap, he was on his fourth piece of pizza.

"How can you eat that stuff?" she asked with a disgusted sneer.

"By opening my mouth and shoving," he said, before opening his mouth and taking half a piece in a single bite. "I'm all done with my assignment, can we go now?"

"I'm in an accelerated program to get my degree," she said. "I've been travelling too much and am really behind. I'm not leaving because you're bored."

"You can give me the keys and…"

"No, Harry."

"Sigh."

"You don't…did you just say, 'sigh'?"

"Yeah, so?"

"You don't say the word, Harry. You actually do the action."

Harry smiled. "You sound smart. Definitely got the ELA portion down."

Marissa sighed before taking a bite of her much less impressive lunch. As she did so, she saw the notebook that held his doodles. "What's that?"

Harry glanced down, momentarily distracted from his cheesy, pepperoni goodness. "Er, magic runes. When I'm done I'm going to get them tattooed all over my body so I'll be impervious. Just like my avatar."

He saw her eyes light up. "Avatar?"

"Yeah. Total gamer. Craft of War, handle of Forever Mage. I'm a level ten, you know. Only a dozen level tens worldwide."

She stared at him, wrap forgotten. "Holy. Shit. You're _the_ Forever Mage? The one with the cats? _You_?"

Harry buffed his nails against his sweater. "Don't like to brag, you know. But if you want to show your appreciation…"

"No," she said absently. "But you're Forever Mage? Okay, when we get back, you're on my team."

"I have a team!"

"Do you have a box?"

"Oh, well shit," Harry muttered. Then he brightened. "Are there any benefits to being a teammate? I mean…"

"No."

"Sigh."

She shook her head, but then chuckled. "You're going to a real pain, aren't you?"

"It's a coping mechanism. Hey, do you have a sister?"

She sighed.

~~Simurgh's Son~~

~~Simurgh's Son~~

After dinner in the common room with fifty of the mercenaries Coil kept on premises (another fifty were allowed to live off-site at any given time except when on call) Harry started up toward his room. He barely made it up the stairs to the private wing that held all of Coil's resident capes when he was intercepted by Marissa.

"There you are. Where were you?"

"Eating."

"Come on."

"Why?"

She rolled her eyes, grabbed the sleeve of his hoody and dragged him down the hall toward a room with a partially opened door. Inside he saw two other people—a blond boy whose face looked almost like a Ken doll, it was so perfect. The other was a girl with frumpy auburn hair held back in a poorly knotted bun with three earrings on her left ear. She sat in a wheelchair. They both sat in front of little computer desks with large monitors and state-of-the-art gaming PCs. Harry saw there were three other similar stations against the wall of the room, which also housed a narrow bed and a shelf full of books. A large wardrobe dominated the far corner of the room.

"Who's this?" Ken-Doll said.

"Guys, remember the new kid I had to drive to school?" Marissa said, almost bouncing on the balls of her feet. "Guess who he is?"

"Harry Bailey, the only Simurgh-influenced kid to survive London?" the girl in the wheelchair said without looking away from her terminal.

"No!" Marissa blinked. "Okay, yes. But Jess, _he's the_ Forever Mage! Level 10!"

"Fuck me," Jess said.

"Okay!" Harry said brightly. "This room or mine?"

Ken doll blinked in confusion, but Jess simply stared flatly at him.

"Oh, and he's a perv." Marissa's addition seemed unnecessary at that point.

"Ya don't say," Jess muttered. "Still, if the Forever Mage thing is true, get him online. We're going up again Faultline's crew and I'm not losing again."

~~Simurgh's Son~~

~~Simurgh's Son~~

He wondered back into his room past eleven, tired but happy. He'd laid waste to many villages and smited many a foe while complimenting the bouncing breasts of Jess's avatar. It was fun, the first fun he'd had in a while.

The buzzing of his phone almost made him fall off his bed. Frowning in confusion, he flipped it open and stared at a text bubble.

 _New kid. Fitting in?_

He considered the words. There was no source code, so he had no idea who this person was. Still, they had his number. _Maybe. Who are you?_

 _Call me TT. I'm another well-paid slave._

Hmm. That sounded interesting. _Are you a girl? Are you pretty?_

 _Opinions vary._

 _About being a girl? Or being pretty?_

A selfie appeared.

 _Oh. Very pretty. Wow. Wait…that's a picture of Sheila Peters when she was younger._

 _And?_

 _Do you have any of her nude?_

 _Maybe. Coil didn't outfit your phone with internet access, did he? Just voice and text._

 _No. The shite._

 _You're not going to get one, either. Or a computer. Or a tablet. He doesn't want you on PHO, or any other outlet you could ask for help from._

 _Ha. Needn't have bothered. Tried that in Leicester when Marko first took me. All it got me was acid burns on my back and a beating that left me unconscious for a day. Justinian used a lighter on my thighs and murdered the whole family of the person I asked to help me. Learned my lesson there._

 _Sorry. Your life has been shit._

 _I_ know _that. I'm the poor sod stuck living it._

 _So, when you close your eyes and go still, like you did in the parking lot this afternoon for two whole hours, what do you see?_

 _Are you fucking spying on me?_

 _I spy on everyone. It's my job. But I don't send everyone porn. I might make an exception for you, if you do me a favor._

 _My palm and I are listening._

 _Coil has a vault on the third level down. Go down and listen. Tell me what you hear._

 _Yeah, right. And have Coil shoot me. No thanks._

A photo appeared.

 _Mary, Joseph and Margaret Thatcher, look at the size of those tits! What's her name? Do you think she'd marry me?_

 _More to come if you help. I can make sure all the cameras are off and all personnel are away for 10 minutes tonight._

 _You know, porn is all good and fine. I mean, really really good, and totally fine. But I'm a teenaged boy with an active imagination. I don't really need it. So you'll have to do better._

 _Better than this?_

Picture.

 _Shit. Give me a sec…_

…

…

 _Yeah. Better than that. Though that was pretty bleedin' good. I want to meet you._

 _That would be exceedingly dangerous. Get-shot-in-the-head dangerous._

 _I'm not sure I care. I might do your favor if you meet me in person. Clothing optional. I have a feeling you're quite pretty._

 _I look like Rosie O'Donnell._

 _Bah, bite your tongue! Besides, I'm sure she's a lovely person on the inside. You shouldn't judge a person by their appearance._

 _Unless you're a hormone-driven teenaged virgin._

 _Well, that remains unsaid, doesn't it? I want to meet. Pick a time; pick a place that won't get us shot. Then I'll decide whether to risk this vault of yours._

A picture. A girl in a dark room, oval face with a petite button nose. Dirty blonde hair made white by the flash of a camera phone, dark eyes and full lips. And a line of freckles over the cheekbones.

 _Tomorrow, school cafeteria at lunch. Marissa is going to be sitting a practice SAT tomorrow._

 _You are pretty._

 _I'm also the single most non-sexual girl you will ever meet. Your palm will give you a lot more action than you'd ever get from me._

 _Again, that remains unsaid. My palm is my best friend. See you tomorrow then, TT._

 _Tomorrow._

The text bubble went away, along with all the rest of hers. A second later, his text bubbles disappeared from his phone as well. The single photo purported to be Tattletale herself also disappeared, but the other photos remained.

"Hello, my lovelies," Harry whispered. "Whatever shall we do tonight?"


	4. Genesis 3

A/N: So, turns out the chapter title formatting can't handle punctuation, so be aware that as the story progresses the chapter numbering you see in the TOC will increasingly not match the actual chapter numbers. Also, review responses for the previous chapter are in my forums.

This is a short chapter, but important because it is setting the stage. My goal with the slow start was to let their be an actual reason why Harry was in Brockton Bay, and believable circumstances (within the context of the story) for him to end up where he does. Of course, whether I succeeded or not is up to you the readers, but that's why the first five chapters are simply setting the stage for the 280,000 word story that will follow.

* * *

 **Genesis 1.3**

"You're Amy, right? Can I sit by you today? The counselor's aide kid yesterday said you were tops in biology and I could use the help."

Amy Dallon sat in the middle of the still empty classroom with her head down and a hood from her pullover covering her dark, curly hair. She had earphones with music just loud enough that Harry could identify…of course. Sara McLachlan. What sad, depressed teen-aged girl _didn't_ listen to Sara McLachlan?

She glanced up at him only after a long moment, as if hoping he'd already gone away. Since he hadn't, her manners demanded she respond. She pointedly removed an earbud and said. "What?"

"Hello," Harry said, feeling even more odd as more kids came in to a room that a second ago only held Panacea. "My name's Harry, I'm the new transfer. I'm behind in biology and a kid in the counselor's office said you were the top student. I was wondering if I could sit by you, and if you'd be willing to help me catch up?"

"I'm sorry, I don't do tutoring." She sounded more bored than sorry. More concerning was that her song sounded like someone squishing macaroni through plastic wrap than the nightingales he would have expected. "I do full shifts at hospitals every day."

Harry shrugged; no possibility of succeeding if he didn't try. "Well, sorry to bother…"

"Is the new kid bothering you, Amy?"

A wave of loathing and fear swept over Harry, so powerful a part of him wanted to just wither away and die. In the back of his mind, the Simurgh sang a song of Samson, strong until his one weakness was betrayed by one he loved.

He met Victoria Dallon's gaze head on and grinned. "Well, truth was I was hoping for tutoring in biology, but even I have to admit working a hospital shift is more important. So, I'll probably just look for a tutor afterschool. Huge fan of yours, by the way. That thing with the girl…what's her name?"

"You mean Mixer?" The feelings of loathing and fear turned into approval and an urge to hug her.

Harry had no idea who Mixer was, or what her thing might have been, but he bet that in Glory Girl's line of business, there'd been some girl, somewhere, she had a thing with.

"Yeah, that! Beautiful job, that. Don't think Alexandria could have done better. Then again, I only met Alexandria once, and she didn't stay and chat. Legend was much cooler."

Who did the heroes look up to? The Triumvirate, of course.

"Oh God, Legend is so hot," Victoria squealed. "Where'd you meet him?"

"Most recent? Day or so ago in New York. But we go way back, met him in London 'bout eight years back. Gave me a flight and everything. Bought me an ice cream and even let me stay with him for a couple of nights in his guest room with the Queen's Men's headquarters. Sat with me for my first counseling session and everything. He was great."

Victoria looked a little confused, bless her soul. Amy, however, did not. She was now looking at Harry not as a student, but as a potential threat. "He's talking about the London Simurgh attack, Vicky. This must be Harry Bailey. You know, the Simurgh's Son?"

Harry held up both hands at Vicky's instant alarm. "Um, for the record, my mum's name was Lily. Not Simurgh. That…thing killed my mum and dad. But Legend saved me. Legend vouched for me when my cousin Thomas Calvert brought me over. Great man, that. An assistant director with your local PRT."

Vicky relaxed a little. "I read about you," she said, more speculatively now as she studied him. "Calvert seems pretty cool. What's he like at home?"

"Long as my homework's done, he's pretty relaxed," he said. In a way, it was true. "I already have a group I game with, and I'm making friends. Or…well, trying to. I really didn't know about the hospital thing, Amy. That's…that's real important. So, I am sorry I bothered you. Still, I hope to see you two around. Hell, the Dallon girls. What more could a boy ask for in friends like those?"

Amy wasn't buying it. Victoria was already sold. "Well glad to meet you, Harry. Better get ready, class is about to start."

~~Simurgh's Son~~

~~Simurgh's Son~~

Harry glanced across the well-lit cafeteria of Arcadia. One whole wall was made up of windows that looked out over an open-air seating area. It was covered in a foot of snow at the moment, but he knew in spring it would be gorgeous.

Victoria Dallon held court at one of the tables nearest the windows. Occasionally she would stand and gesticulate for emphasis about whatever story she was telling, and everyone at the table would laugh appropriately, even the Wards that hung around her. He wondered, with her aura, just how much choice they had.

Amy sat next to Vicky, picking at a salad with her earbuds in and her hoody up. She smiled occasionally at something Vicky said, but never actually participated in the discussion. The two did not look like sisters at all—Victoria was physically perfect, the kind of girl that other girls hated just on principal (unless an aura prevented them from doing so). Amy on the other hand looked almost Mediterranean with thick, black curly hair and a round face with a long, Roman nose. Vicky's skin was the perfect porcelain of a Botticelli painting, or an Elizabethan sonnet. Amy's was olive-toned—pale, but with a hint that with a little more sunlight she would have been bronzed.

A not-so-small part of him yearned very much to be at that table, laughing with the others

Then a pretty blonde girl with freckles sat down right in front of him. "If you stare any harder the Wards will think you're a stalker," she said casually. She wore jeans and a navy-blue cashmere sweater. She placed a tray filled with chips—French fries—and a vegetarian sandwich down on the table in front of him, looking as if she'd been going to that school forever.

TT. Studying her, he saw that she was actually even prettier than her picture implied, with a figure that matched her face. The freckles were what did it, Harry realized. He adored freckles on a girl. He guessed she was close to Marissa's age.

"Down boy, not even remotely interested," she said firmly, as if she could read his mind.

"Yeah, I know," he said sadly. "You should've just sent me your picture to begin with, though."

"That is so fucking creepy on so many levels."

Harry shrugged, not the least bit repentant. "Wanna know what's creepy? Your song sounds like New Complexity. Ferneyhough, maybe. Modern, almost impossible to follow. Notes coming from all over the place. Thinker. Thinkers are loners—they hate other Thinkers and have difficulty with relationships."

She leaned forward, her luscious lips curling into a vulpine smile. "And you're not a cape, but you're not just a kid either. What do you see when you go in your fugue state, Harry Bailey?"

The two stared at each other for the longest time. Finally, Harry broke the stalemate by eating one of her chi…fries. "So, any more Sheila Peters pics? I know she's done some full nudes in some of her films."

Tattletale snorted and leaned back. "You're a good actor."

"Yeah, well, gotta be, don't I? And liking pretty girls isn't an act. I'm…actually kind of sad it wouldn't work with you. You really are beautiful."

She stared a moment. "And of course you mean that, don't you? It's amazing you haven't been shot yet, Bailey."

He shrugged. "It is. It really is. All part of my charm, I suppose. So, why the vault?"

"Need to know."

"So you're saying I don't?"

"No, I'm saying I _do._ I need to know what's in that vault. I know your gamer friends know, but Coil keeps me on a completely separate team so I can't get a read on what's down there."

Harry finished his pizza as he thought about it. Around them, the ebb and flow of the students of Arcadia formed a constant drone that made their conversation as private as one could hope. He nibbled on pizza as she at her fries.

"This other team. They good people?"

"They're people. Capes are always fucked up; some are more fucked than others. We've been together less than a year, doing small jobs. We're recruiting, though, so we can escalate. Capes only, no minions."

Hmmm. "Right. So, you spy on everyone. How do I know you're not spying on me for Coil?"

She ate a fry. "Guess you don't. But I'm not."

"I know one way for you to prove it."

She sighed tiredly. "I'm not showing you my tits, Bailey. Not now. Not ever. And that wouldn't prove anything to anyone—a real spy would do it."

"I was going to say make a vow or something," Harry muttered.

"No you weren't."

He sighed sadly. "No, I wasn't. I'd bet they're marvelous, too. So, I'll consider your request if you answer one question for me. Is Coil ever going let me go?"

The vulpine grin faded. She simply studied him, like a bug or interesting picture. Except, he knew it was the way she viewed the world. Her thoughts moved so fast there was no time for her emotions to catch up. "Do you want the happy answer or the likely answer?"

Harry shrugged. "Simurgh murdered my folks when I was eight and it's actually gotten worse since then. I don't see a happy ending in my future."

She looked down at her tray a moment, as if bracing herself for something truly unpleasant. Finally, she met his eyes. "No, he's not. Me neither. He's going to use us until he has what he wants, and then he's going to remove anything that can connect his villain persona to his civilian persona. Coil isn't his long term future, just a tool he's using to get to it. You, me, anyone that could connect them will have to be removed. I'm sorry."

His heart thud in his chest as he heard the brutally honest confirmation of all his fears. He covered it like always and shrugged. "Like I said, I don't foresee a lot of happy endings. If I thought I could get away, I'd be gone by now."

He knew she saw right through his braggadocio. He found himself grateful that she chose not to comment on it. "Will you do it?"

"Probably, but I have to get a few things lined up first. Let me think on it a bit, okay?"

TT nodded, then got up and left. Somehow, she'd eaten her entire lunch while they spoke and he never realized it.

He spent that day in a mild daze, thinking constantly about one of Coil's men putting a bullet in his head. Would it be the _Awnold_ the Terminator wanna be? Would it be Luke Casseus?

Or Marissa?

He was going to die, probably before he was eighteen, and it felt like there was nothing he could do about it. _I hate my life. I hate my life so much._

Amy Dallon sat down next to him, breaking him from his down-ward spiraling thoughts. He looked up, genuinely surprised to find himself on a bench in the huge arena-sized gym that Arcadia sported. He was dressed in athletic shorts and a tank-top, but was sitting on a bench watching everyone else exercise.

Amy was dressed the same as him, only with a full T-shirt. She didn't show any sign of having exercised either. Instead, she was studying him intently.

"What?"

"Vicky hit you with a full blast of her aura in biology. You didn't even blink."

Harry shrugged and opted for truth. "The Simurgh was worse."

The answer surprised her; he could see how she leaned back. "Some think you blocked the Simurgh's scream out; that's how you've adjusted. But they're lying. You wince around me, or Vicki."

"What're you talking about?" If a hero found out he could detect capes…

She saw his fear. "I can read body language better than anyone I know. It's hard to lie to me. You have a tell—a little wince around the eyes whenever you're around me, or Vicky. Or a few other students. If Assistant Director Calvert weren't your guardian, I'd be worried."

Harry looked away from her gaze. She wasn't sitting there as a friend; she was testing him to see if he represented a threat to her or hers. Worse yet, she had every reason to be worried.

"The Simurgh messed me up, pretty badly," he admitted. "I remember Eidolon wanted to leave me in London, next to my parents, for the DDID containment. You know what that is?"

"Extermination," Amy said without flinching. "After Lousanne, the Triumvirate realized that the Simurgh created weapons in random people in any population. For the first few cities after, the Triumvirate felt it had no choice but to eliminate any influenced populace. They changed to quarantine later—no one enjoyed slaughtering the victims."

Harry nodded and looked out over the gym filled with laughing kids oblivious to the hell that was their collapsing world. "Eidolon wanted to leave me there to die. Alexandria did leave me there. She checked to see my parents were dead and then just left. But Legend didn't. He picked me up and held me. He didn't care if I was Simurgh-influenced or not, he saved my life. He vouched for me just last week when Thomas brought me over. I'm fucked up, but I know it could have been a lot worse."

Everything he said was true, and none of it pertinent at all to his presence in that school.

A part of him felt sad that, while it was hard to fool Amy Dallon, it wasn't impossible. She nodded and seemed to relax around him. "I'm sorry for your losses," she said. She almost sounded sincere.

Harry shrugged. "With all you do, you don't owe anyone apologies, for anything. I get people worshipping your sister. She's drop-dead gorgeous with the full Alexandria package. But the way I think of it, you've saved or changed hundreds of more lives than she ever will. She might get the attention, but you're the better hero."

She didn't smile, she simply stared at him. "You know just what to say, don't you?"

Harry shrugged. "Not really. I mean, if I _really_ did know what to so, I'd have been laid by now, don't you think?"

She blinked, and then shook her head. "And _now_ you choose to sound like a teenager instead of a tired old man."

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"I've been watching you, Harry Bailey. Sometimes you sound centuries older than you should. You always seem to know what to say—like the stereotypical dad in a '50's family show. I understand—good or bad, you are Simurgh-influenced. Still, I think it would be best if you stay from me and Vicky, or our friends. I'm not saying this to be mean or hurtful, but I just can't make myself trust you. Even if Vicky does, if I tell her you're a threat, she'll treat you as one."

Harry wasn't sure what surprised him more—that she rejected him so thoroughly, or that it actually _hurt._ "Yeah, okay," he said quickly. "I'll stay away."

Amy nodded, then stood and left him on the bench staring at all the other kids having fun.

~~Simurgh's Son~~

~~Simurgh's Son~~

During his evening debrief with Coil, he conveyed his conversation with Amy. "She figured out I can sense capes," he told his boss. "I have a tell, supposedly. She told me to stay away from her group."

Coil frowned and tapped his fingers on his desk. He was actually in full costume with his head-covering mask on, his door open. He had a meeting later, Harry suspected.

"That's unfortunate," he said. "Arcadia was a perfect position for you to be able to detect any new Wards that might transfer in."

"I don't have to leave…"

"You misunderstood her warning, Mr. Bailey. She was telling you to leave Arcadia. Panacea is not just protected for her power, but her family is highly influential both in city politics and with the PRT. I will be very surprised if I don't get a visit from Director Piggot tomorrow regarding you."

Harry frowned intently. "Do you think…do you think she'll give away my sensitivity?" The idea that he wouldn't have any purpose terrified him. He had no doubt Coil would dispose of someone who offered no benefit but knew who he was.

Worse yet, Coil simply sat and stared into space rather than answering. Abruptly, though, Harry understood when he felt a tingling in Coil's song, and a splitting sensation. He was projecting probabilities.

"I don't know," the villain finally said. "However, it may not be too late to salvage the situation if you are very, very careful. I've been told that when you are not intentionally trying to irritate, you have a facile tongue. Be prepared to use it as if your life depended on it. Don't plan on going to school tomorrow."

Harry nodded, fighting to keep his terror under control. Coil just openly admitted his life was going to be decided within the next day.

"This evening," Coil continued, "you're going to stay in my civilian home. Pack all your clothes and any personal items you have. Perhaps Sundancer will lend you one of their gaming consoles. It must look like you actually live there. I suspect PRT agents will come collect you from my civilian residence."

"Okay." Harry didn't argue or talk back, he just nodded.

"Be ready within the hour."

"Yes, boss."

Harry fled the office, more terrified than since Justinian caught him asking his teacher for help.

The moment he left Coil's office, Harry ran. He darted through the halls until he reached the apartment wing, and then continued running through the door and down the hall until he reached Jess's room. He knocked twice before he heard a voice call him inside.

Not surprisingly, Jess was at her console, with the Ken Doll Oliver, who had a song that didn't seem to do very much but hum prettily. Marissa was there as well, looking as beautiful as ever.

"Hey," she said. "Hop on, we're…"

"I need to borrow one of your computers," he blurted. "I mean, Coil asked me to ask. The whole cart, everything."

Jess stared at him with that flat expression she got when she was faintly annoyed. "Why?"

"Er…I think Panacea may have figured out that I sense capes. She…I think I might be in trouble. I mean, real trouble. If…if…" Suddenly he found it difficult to voice the fact that their mutual boss would not hesitate a second to have him shot. "Anyway, Coil thinks the PRT is going to want to interview me. I have to look like I live at…wherever I'm going to be. Please, can I borrow a console just until this blows over?"

"Why would you be in trouble?" Marissa asked.

Jess, though…he could see in her face that she got it. Even more than Marissa, Jess understood the kind of man they were working for. "Fine, take it," she said. "It's already powered down, just unplug and disconnect it from the router."

"Thank you!" He quickly unplugged and disconnected everything and rolled the entire cart to his room, where he then packed everything Coil had bought him so far. By the time the two men in matching black slacks and gray sweaters arrived, he was as ready as he could be.


	5. Genesis 4

A/N: Chapter 4 review responses are in my forums as normal. You can find the link to my forums in my profile page. And with this chapter, Harry begins to see possibilities for the first time in his life.

* * *

 **Genesis 1.4**

Thomas Calvert lived in a nice neighborhood that, in any other city, would have been called middle class. In Brockton Bay, it was upper middle class. It bore no gang tags, and just in the evening he spent watching the telly in Calvert's immaculate living room, he saw three patrol cars drive by outside.

It was beyond merely unsettling to go through the motions of home life with a man who might order his death at any minute, and would have been unbearable but for the fact it was oddly familiar. Harry had played this game before. Justinian made Harry aware that his lack of daily rules had a hard limit that would end with a bullet in his head.

Calvert went through the motions of cooking them dinner and ordering Harry to set the table. Harry did as instructed and wondered if they were under surveillance even as they ate. The fact that Calvert remained in his public persona made him think so; he knew better than to ask.

"So, Harry," he said casually over dinner. "I received an interesting call today from your school. I understand you tried to approach Amy Dallon?"

Harry looked at Coil with wide eyes. The man's flat expression made it clear he was not having any more fun than Harry was. "Er, well, yeah. The counselor's aid said she was tops in biology, and you said you wanted my grades up. I…I suppose I just figured she'd be really good as a tutor. I didn't realize all the time she put in at hospitals, though. I didn't mean to bother her, honest."

He knew he was laying it on thick, but then again this was his life. He realized from Coil's perspective this was a major inconvenience to him. He was having to spent time and money to protect an asset that was very soon about to lose all value.

"Well, I'm sure you'll have ample opportunity to explain it to their mother tomorrow," Calvert said. Somehow he sounded anticipatory. "Mrs. Dallon contacted me at PRT headquarters and asked to speak with you."

"Mrs. Dallon? You mean…"

"Brandish, yes. She also happens to be a senior partner in one of the city's most successful law firms. I trust you'll show the proper level of respect?"

"Yes, sir! Absolutely."

"I hope so. Mrs. Dallon has a very cordial relationship with the PRT given her leadership in New Wave. I would hate for you to do or say anything to jeopardize that relationship."

"I understand. I won't, I promise. Er…may I be excused?"

"After you wash the dishes, of course."

"Right."

Harry washed the dishes, put everything back once he found where that was, and retreated to the bedroom where he was to spend the night. He sat on the mattress, pulled out his notebook, and lost himself in memories.

~~Simurgh's Son~~

~~Simurgh's Son~~

It snowed that night. When Thomas Calvert drove Harry in a 2010 Ford _Corolla_ to the PRT headquarters the next day, it was through a city blanketed in snow. As they drove, he handed Harry a badge. Harry looked down in surprise to see the visitor's badge from New York.

"That badge is good for six months," Calvert said simply.

Having attended Arcadia, Harry was not surprised to learn that the PRT ENE was actually only a few blocks from the high school. Given where the Wards attended school, he supposed that made sense.

They passed through the security gate with a flick of Calvert's badge and a palm reader. Harry sat patiently as the steel cylindrical barriers dropped down until the tops were level with the street. They continued toward the building.

They drove down a ramp into a garage that was just like what Harry saw in New York, only reduced in scale. Once past a row of PRT patrol cars and a series of unmarked white vans, the garage looked much like any other, with various models of cars lined up in a row.

Calvert pulled the Corolla into a space with a plaque that read: Assistant Director 1-4A.

They stopped the car. Calvert didn't look at Harry as he spoke _soto voce_. "Armsmaster will be at the meeting. He and Carol are as close to being friends as Armsmaster is capable of being with anyone. I've recently learned that he has a program that can tell when someone is lying. Be careful, Harry."

Something about the warning made all the memories Harry carried in his mind boil, though he couldn't understand why. He followed Calvert out of the car and to another security kiosk, where both were thoroughly screened before being allowed in their elevator.

"The meeting is at ten, so I'm afraid we'll have a couple of hours to waste," Calvert said in the elevator. Unlike the New York PRT, there were no breathtaking views from a glass lift—either because it was a smaller office, or because Brockton Bay afforded no breath-taking views.

"That's fine," Harry said.

Calvert's office was on the third floor of the five floor building, not a corner office but one that did have windows looking out over the bay. As seemed to be the case since Harry arrived, it was cold and gloomy outside. He pointed to a chair and Harry sat. "I have a meeting this morning with Director Piggot. Please understand that this office is under surveillance."

 _Don't do anything stupid,_ in other words.

"Yes, sir."

Harry sat down and closed his eyes, fully intending to mentally rehearse what he would say.

He lasted three seconds before memories that were not his own overtook him.

~~Simurgh's Son~~

~~Simurgh's Son~~

" _How long has it been?"_

" _Four hundred years. You would reckon the date at 3012 CE."_

 _Harry Potter appeared to be seventeen, despite the ancient gleam in his eyes. He looked about the room with interest. It was_ his _office, in the rebuilt Hogwarts of Caldos. He could feel the heart stone below the castle, and he knew the five women recently pledged and bonded to him as his wives were three floors down, being checked over. He could feel them like a compass to his soul._

 _Facing him was one of his own distant descendants, a great granddaughter with three or more greats added to it. She bore no resemblance to him or to Susan Chamberlain, the second Lady Slytherin from whom she was descended. She just looked old, approaching her own second century with snow white hair she wore in a braid away from her weathered, wrinkled face._

 _It was their first meeting in the week since his rebirth._

" _You said if Caldos was ever threatened, we would call on you," Allale Slythin said in strong voice that belied her obvious age. "I would never have committed those girls otherwise."_

" _They weren't willing?" Harry asked._

 _She waived away his concern. "Posh, they were too willing. Every woman in this castle would have jumped at the chance. Your life is well documented, as are the lives of all those who shared it with you. Nonetheless, we find ourselves in danger and the Federation is floundering. Before your second awakening, the Federation fought a long and bloody war against a Gamma Quadrant empire called the Dominion."_

" _I remember reading about it," Harry said._

" _One of the leading member races was called the Vorta. They were genetically engineered to worship the Dominion Founders as gods, and possessed telekinetic abilities. The Founders have…forcibly evolved their abilities to include a powerful form of telepathy. Six months ago, the Dominion began a campaign to push the Federation out of the Gamma Quadrant. They have won every engagement so far almost without losses. Sensor logs show crewmen collapsing from their chairs, often dying on the spot the moment they engage the enemy. The only survivors were a handful of older Vulcans and Mages, and even they reported powerful mental attacks similar to legillimancy that left them weakened and unable to function."_

" _Occlumancy…?"_

" _Is the only reason the Mages lived. Those who didn't know it died as well. Four hundred million Federation citizens have died so far, and the Federation Council fears the Dominion will not stop with the Gamma Quadrant. The Council has formally asked us to lead the resistance."_

 _Harry frowned at the distressing news. "I suppose that explains why I'm here, but the mind arts were never my strength."_

 _The headmistress smiled wryly. "The subject is my strength, however. I called a convocation two months before your rebirth of the most powerful occlumens on Caldos, and our best researchers with them. We have developed a new form of Occlumancy which we believe will stop the telepathic attacks. I've asked you here to teach you this new Occlumancy, and after, if you're willing, to lead our forces against the Dominion."_

 _Harry Potter shrugged. "It's what I do."_

~~Simurgh's Son~~

~~Simurgh's Son~~

Harry Bailey jumped a little when he felt a hand on his shoulder. He looked up to see a woman in her forties, unremarkable in appearance, straighten. "Sorry to wake you, Mr. Bailey. My name is Karen, Mr. Calvert asked that I escort you to Conference Room 4.10."

 _Condemnation. Information leads her to believe I am a bad person. Leading me to just deserts._

It surprised Harry how clearly he could read her face, mostly from little muscle ticks long her eyes and the corners of her mouth. He felt distant from both the realization, and from her as well. Within his head, it felt as if his thoughts had been directed from their normally chaotic paths into narrow, efficient channels. According to his memories, pre-Caldosian Occlumency concerned building mental barriers to deflect intrusive attempts. Post-Caldosian Occlumency was the technique of shaping those thoughts so efficiently that outside intrusion could not find or impact them.

 _Is this what it feels like to be a Thinker?_

The thoughts ran through his head in the time it took for him to formulate a response. He yawned and smiled as if tired. "Oh, right. Thanks, must've dozed off."

He followed Karen out of Calvert's office to the lift and from there up one floor until they reached another hallway that looked remarkably like the one he just left. They finally reached the conference room. Karen knocked first but didn't wait for permission before opening the door for him.

An oval table dominated the interior of the room, running its whole length. On the far end Harry saw a looming figure in full body armor with a beard under his closed visor who had to be Armsmaster. Next to him was a tall, statuesque woman with the same shade of blonde hair that Vicky Dallon had, with a similar bone structure but a few more wrinkles that her expensive foundation couldn't quite hide.

Next to her sat Amy Dallon in her full Panacea garb, white robe with a hood and a red cross and stylized caduceus with stars instead of snakes. A red scarf hung around her neck, ready to hide her mouth if she so chose.

Calvert sat next to Panacea, while next to him sat a grim-looking, obese woman with bobbed, beach-blonde hair and a pantsuit that strained miserably to contain her considerable girth.

 _Carol Dallon sits stiffly. Jaw jutting slightly forward, leaning forward slightly as well. Eying me like a predator. Armsmaster is bored; feels this meeting is below him and…unfair. He sees just like I do that the seating has been arranged to make me feel isolated and unwanted. Piggot hates everyone. Calvert is prepared to give me up to preserve his position. Amy is angry. Feels I've infringed on something I had no right to. Optimal course is to refuse to be the victim._

The only other chair was on the end by Harry, putting him alone at the end of the table. "Please have a seat, Harry," Thomas said with a nod to the chair.

"Thank you." Harry picked the chair up and carried it next to Armsmaster to the obvious consternation of all those at the table.

"Sorry, felt odd shouting at everyone across the table," he said with a grin. He looked to Armsmaster. "Hi, Harry Bailey. You must be Armsmaster, Legend said you were a great hero when he found out I was coming to Brockton Bay. An honor to meet you, sir."

"And you as well, Mr. Bailey." Armsmaster accepted Harry's outstretched hand with only a moment's hesitation.

Harry sat and forced a grin. Her spoke again before Carol Dallon could begin her attack. "Well, if nothing else, I've learned to never, ever ask a Dallon for tutoring. I promise that won't ever happen again."

"Tutoring?" Carol Dallon asked. "According to my daughters you somehow resisted Glory Girl's aura and tried to insinuate yourself into her circle of friends."

Harry tilted his head and blinked in surprise. "Insinuate? I was pretty open about it, I thought. She's gorgeous, and seems to have all the cool friends. I'm the loner new kid, I was hoping if I could get in with Glory Girl of all people, it might help me fit in better. And if not, again, she's gorgeous. Even her sister's pretty cute, though I say again, I've learned my lesson there. If asking for tutoring help gets me a grilling from the Director of the PRT and the head of the local Protectorate, then it's definitely better being the loner new kid."

Amy sat up, her cheeks flushed with anger. "How did you resist her aura?"

Harry shrugged. "I _told_ you. It didn't have anything on the Simurgh. It just didn't really affect me. I felt it, yes I did, but I just chose not to do let it affect me. Just like I choose not to let Simurgh's singing affect me."

Armsmaster and Piggot both straightened in their seats. "You spoke present tense," Armsmaster said. "Does that mean…?"

"Yeah, I can still hear her," Harry admitted. His confidence seemed to melt away a little. "At night, when I'm trying to sleep. Any time I try to remember what my mum or dad look like. One of my first guardians burned my back with acid, and I heard her sing then. Like I said, I hear it, but I choose not to let it control my life. She's done enough to make me miserable as is."

Carol Dallon stared at him in horror. Amy, though, looked like she was about to explode. "You're lying!" she said. "I know you were trying to…you..!"

Harry didn't understand what she was trying to do when she jumped up from her chair, ignoring her mother and Armsmaster, and grabbed his hand. "You're…" She let go abruptly. "Shit. Shit shit. What kind of monster does that to a kid? You were fucking twelve!"

With a single touch, Panacea somehow knew the entire history of his body. He began to see why her song sounded like squishing macaroni and zombies instead of harps and nightingales. Healing, he began to suspect, was a mere side effect.

"Amy, what is it?" Carol asked.

"Acid burns, all up and down his back. Five burns along his inner thighs…."

"And so much for HIPPA," Harry said, cutting her off. His thoughts were burning now, they went so fast. A door had just opened and he was going to knock it out of its frame to ensure it stayed open.

"I know I'm a minor, but damn it did anyone give you permission to just fucking invade my body?" He stood up, shaking. "Being a damn cape doesn't mean you get to treat everyone else like shit! I just wanted to be your friend, and now you try to have me interrogated by all the power in the city? You invade my privacy? For what? To do what? What did I _do_ to you to deserve this? To deserve any of this?"

 _Dallon is on the defensive. She and Amy both recognize Amy has violated my rights with a parahuman power. Now is the time to end this._

He took a deep breath. "Thomas, are they…are they trying to arrest me, or press charges against me?"

Calvert glared at Carol Dallon in a performance as masterful as Harry's. "No, they aren't."

"Can we go home, then?"

"Yes, I think so. Armsmaster, Director Piggot, I believe we're done here." Calvert specifically ignored Amy and her mother as he stood and walked briskly toward the door with Harry a step behind.

Neither said a thing until they were back in his Civic, heading toward his civilian home. "A masterful performance, Mr. Bailey," he said. "Armsmaster could not detect a single lie."

Harry nodded, still feeling somehow distant from everything within a construct of thought that he'd never used before, but which felt like it had always been there. "I suppose my life was on the line, Boss. Do you think it will work?"

"We'll still have to transfer you from Arcadia, but now it will be out of protest against their actions, rather than as a defensive reaction. Yes, I think we were successful. In fact, I should be able to parley some favors from Carol Dallon as a result. Truly, I believe this was the best outcome we could have hoped for."

He actually sounded like he was in a good mood. "You'll have to stay in the house for another few days until we've satisfied the surveillance and the warrant expires, but after that I believe things should return to normal. Who knows, perhaps you'll find a cape at Winslow."

~~Simurgh's Son~~

~~Simurgh's Son~~

" _Not Harry! Please, not Harry!"_ A flash of green light followed by a woman's scream, cut off far too soon.

 _What beautiful eyes you have,_ the dark wizard says with a sickly grin while skillfully flicking his pruning knife between his fingers. _Would you mind if I have one? Or possibly both?_

 _You are the last of your kind, Potter. I've made sure of it. I've slaughtered the whole of your race in the name of purity. Oh, the irony of it. You've been revived into a world where science is more powerful than magic. You're redundant. You're useless. And you are utterly alone. I've won. And every moment you suffer from now until your final death, I will continue to win._

" _This is a spoon, Forever Mage. A simple, non-magical eating utensil that has existed for even longer than you. One of my generals bet me a flask of Saurian brandy that I could not make you scream with a spoon. I accepted the bet because I know, after having had my fun with your wives, that you_ will _scream for me."_

" _Why do you keep fighting, Harry?"_ The young goddess looked beautiful and strong, dressed in a shimmering gown comprised of energy given form. " _Why do you come when they summon you? You have enough power to withstand the call."_

" _I have a 'saving people' thing."_

She caressed his face gently. " _Yes_ ," she said sadly. " _You are forever the hero, damned by your own courage and morality._ That's why it had to be you, Harry. You aren't who you think you are _."_

~~Simurgh's Son~~

~~Simurgh's Son~~

"Harry?"

It took effort to open his eyes. Marissa knelt down in front of him, a worried frown on her face. With her delicate features she suddenly reminded him of one of the girls from the oldest of his memories—the beautiful girl with the white-blonde hair and silver-blue eyes. In his memories, she died. Shot in the head. But not before watching their first born daughter die.

He felt a finger on his cheek and blinked again as Marissa pulled back a tear. "I hadn't seen you at school or here, and so Luke told me what was happening. Are you okay?"

He shrugged. "Er, just a bit buggered in the head is all," he said wryly. "You know, Simurgh survivor and all."

"Yeah, me too," she said. She spoke softly, barely above a murmur.

He stared at her, momentarily shocked out of the lingering grief from the memories that haunted him every time he closed his eyes. "Really?"

"Madison. Me, Jess, Francis, Oliver and Luke. And Cody, but…he's gone. We were in Madison when the Simurgh hit."

"It's when you got your powers," Harry guessed.

She nodded. "I was just checking on you because you've been out all week, and you've been missing dinner. You never miss dinner." She picked up a plate from the floor; she must have put it down when she knelt down by him.

"Oh, thanks love," he whispered. He was hungry, but his mind was still caught up in the memories. "I…I thought he was gonna shoot me. Coil. If Panacea told everyone I could detect capes, the PRT wouldn't let me around them anymore. And if I couldn't do that, what good would I be to Coil?"

"Harry he wouldn't…"

Harry snorted. "Yes he would. He fucking bought me, Marissa. Colbert owned me as a slave, and sold me as a slave. The whole salary thing is just…a little gold on the iron of my cage. I live as long as I'm useful, and I thought that…that I wasn't going to be useful anymore."

He leaned his head back against the wall. "I hate it here. I hate this city. I hate this bleedin' country. I'd give anything to be back in Surrey. I can't even remember what my mum and dad look like, but I'd give anything to see them again. Live with them. You know, just be a normal kid, grow up, maybe find a girl, pump out a sprog or two and just live. I just wanna live."

"Me too," Marissa admitted. "I hate this place too. I've hated every place we've been, it's not home. I want to go home so badly." Then, to Harry's everlasting shock, she leaned over and kissed him. Her breath smelled like chocolate and wine. And baked chicken. She'd been drinking?

Her lips, though, were smooth and soft and he felt the slightest touch of her tongue against his lips. He dismissed every thought and kissed her back, food forgotten. They parted for breath, and her cheeks looked as red as his felt.

"This can't mean anything," she said softly. She reached up and gently caressed his cheek. "You've gotta understand that. I have to stay with the others, and if we leave, we have to leave forever. You understand that, right?"

Numbly, Harry nodded. "All I've got is today anyway."

She stood and walked to his door, locking it. She then turned off the lights. In the shadows, he heard fabric falling to the floor and the slap of bare feet against the cold tile by his bed. A hand reached for him in the dark and he took it in his own, guiding her.

He felt amazingly soft flesh in his hand, and felt her hands pulling his clothes off. "No promises for the future, Harry," she whispered.

"Tonight's enough for now," he agreed as they melted into each other.

~~Simurgh's Son~~

~~Simurgh's Son~~

He didn't sleep, not then and not ever, and so was wide awake when she left the room. He felt cold and lonely in her absence. _So, I've had sex now._

His ego wanted very much to believe that he'd used all the memories of the most sexually active human in all of existence to good effect and left Marissa a quivering ball of satiated desires. However, in all the memories Harry Potter's relationship with women was influenced by magical baby-making bonds that Harry Bailey didn't have.

He lasted about three minutes. "I think I'll do better with practice," he assured Marissa.

She shook her head and smiled before kissing him. "I know you will, Harry."

With her gone, Harry started analyzing the first week, and especially his performance at the PRT. It had been a performance. When faced with that much authority, in a set-up clearly designed to make him feel insignificant, he should have collapsed in on himself and gone into rabbit mode like he did so often with Marko, or the others.

Instead, he took one of the memories that haunted him every time he sat still and somehow _used_ it. He used a technique that the Harry Potter in his dreams learned to control and shield his mind; to actually project any personality necessary for a situation. If there were true telepaths in the world beside the Simurgh, Harry doubted any would have been able to even touch his thoughts.

He turned on the desk light and reached for his book bag, untouched since he'd been out of school. Within he found the notes he'd been drawing on protective runes. He'd been drawing them with an odd thought of creating them for his avatar in Craft of War. However, the memories he obtained the designs from were of Harry Potter tracing them lovingly along the leg of one of his many wives. Or of his wives lovingly doing the same to Harry's own body.

The Runes were the penultimate advancement of magic—the art of Runecraft distilled over eons to a state of utter perfection and protection, designed to shield against the gods themselves.

 _If memories of post-Caldosian Occlumency worked, could these runes actually work as well?_


	6. Genesis 5

A/N: Chap 5 responses are in my forums. For those of you coming into this story cold and who have no desire to read them, I also provided a spoilerific summary of the Harem Trilogy that is the foundation of the Harry Potter in this story. While knowing about the previous series will help fill in some gaps, it is not necessary since this is mostly a stand-alone fic.

 ** _Without a harem._**

* * *

 **Genesis 1.5**

Harry hated public transportation. He most especially hated public transportation in Brockton Bay.

Some cities had subways or trolleys. Brockton Bay had buses; old, poorly maintained buses covered in graffiti and filled with homeless people seeking a brief respite from the freezing cold of early March in New Hampshire. Getting to the bus stop nearest The Coil Evil Lair of Doom™ was itself an arduous task. He had to actually climb banks of plowed snow to reach the sidewalk with the stop, and stood there in the freezing cold waiting for the bus.

Coil got what we wanted. Panacea was no longer regarded by the cape community as an untouchable saint, and Carol Dallon's political currency had taken a major blow. A member of New Wave had used a parahuman power on an innocent civilian without permission. It had taken quite a few promised favors to bury that news.

New Wave had to know that Thomas Calvert could easily have brought Panacea up on charges. She would never have seen a prison, not with the volunteer work she did saving lives, but it would count as a strike under the Three-Strike rule. Harry doubted he was the only one nervous about just how powerful Panacea was.

So, Coil got what he wanted. Harry lived, which was good, but his days of Marissa driving him to a brand new, well-funded state-of-the-art school were long gone. Instead, he stood shivering next to dirty snowbank waiting for a bus to go to school for a degree he likely wouldn't live long enough to achieve.

The bus came and he climbed on for the hour and a half journey it would take to reach Winslow High School. The homeless people were mostly in the far back of the bus, sleeping. Everyone else sat in the middle or near the front. It was still dark out with the winter hours, but at least he wasn't the only one in the bus. Several other students were riding with him, judging from their book bags.

The sky was turning a washed out shade of dull blue by the time they finally reached the weathered, three story façade of Winslow High School. The brick work and the large block letters spoke of 50's era construction. A few skeletal trees reached up like palsied hands grasping at the sky above. Students were trudging through the snow into the school, and Harry found himself following the crowd.

Somehow, it didn't surprise him to see all the students funneled through a series of metal detectors with armed, uniformed police officers running metal detecting wands over any who set the alarm off. The entry way smelled like sweat and unwashed bodies under a veneer of bleach as students crowded against each other trying to make it past security choke-points before classes began. Winslow was just that kind of school.

Harry picked a line at random, since all appeared equally bad, and trudged forward with the other kids. No one looked up or seemed interested in doing anything but getting away from the cold behind them. His turn finally came.

All things considered, it shouldn't have surprised Harry when the detector went off. "Over here," a big, burly cop said. Harry obeyed with hunched shoulders as the cop ran a wand over him. The wand buzzed constantly. "Whatch'ya got on you, kid?" the man asked.

Harry handed his bag to a second officer. "Nothing. Just…got a metal plate or something when I was a kid, I guess. I've set those bloody things off since I was eight. Sorry."

He spoke softly, very much _not_ wanting to call attention to himself. Unfortunately, just being pulled out of the crowd made that difficult. Naturally, it was at that point that a big-chested red-headed girl in a real fur jacket shouted out, "Holy shit, that's Harry Bailey! What the hell is a Simurgh survivor doing in our school?"

The other kids surged away from Harry like he had the plague, and even a couple of the officers looked worried. Harry sighed and felt his shoulders droop more.

"I was at Arcadia for a month, world didn't end," he muttered. He looked at the nearest cop. "I'm just a kid going to school."

The cop shrugged; the situation was above his paygrade. The lack of protests at Arcadia was a fluke, then. Or engineered by Coil because _no one_ protested at Arcadia. As much as he hated it, this reaction here was closer to normal any time he switched schools. Leicester College was just as bad at first.

A narrow-faced, frumpy woman with one of the most unattractive bowl haircuts he'd ever seen plowed through the clumping student body with a big Latino man behind her. The man wore a button-up, tie and slacks, but his bulging arms strained the fabric of his sleeves, while his bulging stomach did the same to the buttons of his shirt. He looked like a former body-builder gone to seed—still ridiculously strong, but not ready to run a marathon anytime soon.

"Mr. Bailey, I'm Principal Blackwell," the woman said in a helium-high voice. Her canary yellow pantsuit threatened to burn out his corneas. "This is Assistant Principal Martinez. We were not informed of your transfer until early this morning or we would have been better able to direct you."

 _Ooooh she sounded pissed,_ Harry thought. "Yeah, sorry about that."

"This way, please."

"Yes, ma'am." It was easy to slip into his sad Simurgh's Son routine. He used it on every state or school official he'd ever met. In fact, in some ways it wasn't even an act. He really did hate the attention, and his life was pretty sadly pathetic.

They reached the administrative section of the school. Despite bright overheads, the offices and desks looked dim and cluttered. Under everything was the faint, ghostly hint of cigarette smoke that probably went back decades and had permeated the floors, ceilings and walls.

Harry followed Blackwell, while Martinez walked right behind him, until they reached a conference room with an oddly egg-shaped conference table. Martinez put a strong hand on Harry's shoulder and directed him to a lone chair at the tip of the table.

He didn't like that, but pursed his lips together. These people weren't his friends, and he had no room to push anyone, anywhere. Coil might have come out ahead in the short turn, but losing Arcadia reduced Harry's value significantly in the villain's eyes.

Blackwell sat at the wide end of the table, but Martinez remained standing behind him. "Mr. Bailey," she said in a clipped, angry tone. "We just received your transcript from Arcadia. Prior to that you went to City of Lay-castor College?"

It was very, very difficult not to laugh. "Sorry, ma'am. Leicester. Just ignore everything between the L and the –iester. Schools' a bit different in the UK. It was for kids 11 through 19. Like your middle and high schools all in one."

Blackwell didn't appear to enjoy the enlightenment. "I see. Your grades weren't all that impressive."

Harry shrugged. "Did my best, bouncing around from home to home. I'm with Mr. Calvert now, though. A distant cousin. You know, I even got to see Legend again when he picked me up at New York. Did you know Mr. Calvert knew Legend? Pretty amazing. That man saved my life, you know."

He couldn't see if Martinez behind him got the message his seemingly innocent round of name-dropping produced, but he noticed Blackwell stiffen. "Yes, your transfer request was signed by Mr. Calvert."

Harry made a show of pulling his ear nervously. "Look, ma'am, I…I understand why you're not happy. I've been through this before; no one really wants me in their school. I promise, I keep my head down. Only time I've ever been in a fight is when someone attacked me. I just want to go to school then go home. My record shows it. I'm not what everyone seems to think. Legend knows, you can ask him."

"I'm sure I'll ring him up," Blackwell said with such open sarcasm her lip looked like it might curl off.

The Principal stewed for a moment, covering her anger by slowly looking over his transcripts. Finally, she looked up at the vice principal. "Jorge, could you please summon Ms. Hess to the counselor's offices."

"Of course, Mrs. Blackwell." Martinez left the room

Blackwell shuffled his file around and let her voice go flat with the monotony of normal business. "We'll enroll you in the core classes for your age group. Do you have a preference for your electives?"

"I don't know what my options are, Principal Blackwell, but anything with computers would be useful, I'd think. I took some programming classes back in the UK."

"Okay, computer programming," she said, marking off a list. "For your physical education? We're well into the Spring semester, so we're limited on your options there."

"Gym's fine, Ma'am," Harry said.

They were just finishing when a lithe young woman with deep black skin and hair tied back in a severe knot accompanied Martinez back into the conference room. She wore tight jeans that hugged every curve and an equally well-fitted red turtleneck.

He glanced at her eyes—almond shaped, black, above a short nose with flared nostrils and full lips set in a constant sneer. The air around her sang in his mind of hateful shadows and men screaming in pain. She wasn't just a cape, she was a killer.

"Mr. Bailey, this is Sophia Hess, one of our best athletes and a leader among the student body. Ms. Hess, as you're probably aware this is Harry Bailey, recently transferred from Arcadia, and before that from England. I would appreciate it if you showed him around the school and helped him adjust."

She looked at Bailey with an expression that could make cockroaches whither. "I have a track meet to prepare for."

"And favors owed," Blackwell returned without pause. "You _will_ do this for me."

"Sure, whatever," she said. She turned to Harry. "Well, come on, freak. Don't have all day."

"We'll be watching you, Mr. Bailey," Martinez said a second before Hess led him out of the office.

"Just fucking perfect, stuck on goddamn baby-sitting duty," she muttered loudly once in the hallway, making no pretense of sparing Harry's feelings. They paused at the front desk. "Yo, Bering, new kid needs a locker and books."

"That's Mrs. Bering to you, Miss Hess," an old, extremely heavy-set woman said as she stood and made her way to the front counter from her desk. "Locker 3-D84, third floor, fourth hallway. Where's his book list?"

"The fuck should I know?" Hess demanded.

"Watch your language you little shit," Mrs. Bering said. Her tone didn't change at all, as if she said things like that all the time. He looked from Hess to Mrs. Bering and wondered if they were mother and daughter.

An ancient dot-matrix computer, likely older than Harry was (possibly older than Mrs. Bering, for that matter), began spitting out paper. Mrs. Bering carefully removed the perforated edges and handed it to Harry with a voucher. "Book vault is right around the corner. Any lost or severely damaged books have to be replaced at cost. Have a nice day."

Somehow, Mrs. Bering made 'Have a nice day' sound just like 'Watch your language you little shit.' He admired her skill and the utter lack of fucks she seemed to give about anything in the world.

He wished he could be like that.

First period rang as he was gathering all his books. Hess didn't appear to care as she led him quickly around the dingy, dirty school with the gang-tagged walls. She didn't point out various halls; she pointed out territory. "E88. You should be fine—hell, they'll probably recruit you with your lily-white ass. Second floor is ABB. They leave you alone if you leave them alone, but if you fuck with any of them they all come down on you hard. Panthers are 3rd floor. I'm fine there, you they'd fuck up if you linger. Get to class, do your damn job, and get out when the bell rings."

She started to leave him in the middle of the hall.

 _Do your damn job._ Harry's mind began racing. She was a cape, a murderous cape, in a public school. She just admitted she knew why he was there. That meant she knew either Coil, or Calvert. His heart thudded as a terrible suspicion formed in his mind—that there was a reason the principal chose this girl as his guide.

She wasn't just there to watch him; she was there to kill him if Coil ceased to value his services. Did that mean Coil owned the principal as well?

A second later Hess was gone, leaving him alone with only the vaguest idea of where anything was. If it weren't business as usual for him, he would have been upset. Instead, he made do and eventually made it to his second period, hoping his status as a new transfer would excuse his tardiness.

During his month at Arcadia, he saw teachers engaged with students. Not joking around or trying to act cool, but speaking to them, challenging them and making their kids participate rather than sit in the back of the class and sleep. In a way Harry admired it, even while hating it.

Winslow was the opposite. From that first class on, he saw teachers who looked exhausted, overworked, and from their clothing and manners, underpaid. Half the class in each of his periods sat in the far back and slept, and the teachers appeared just too worn out to care. He didn't see any sign of another cape, but he went through the motions just like the rest of the kids.

It wasn't until the period before Lunch that Harry sensed another cape.

World Issues was on the second floor—ABB territory according to Hess. Harry saw a few Asian-influenced tags on lockers, but otherwise the hall looked just like any other. Like all his other classes so far, it appeared to be filled to capacity—almost forty kids crammed into a room made for twenty. Somehow, though, there were three empty seats. All three were around a girl his age sitting nearest the door.

She had her head down, so all Harry saw was a headful of curly brunette hair. He ignored her as he went to check in with Mr. Gladly.

World Issues. It shouldn't have surprised him that Gladly knew who he was on sight. Still, he handed his class schedule to the teacher who merely nodded. "Looks in order, Mr. Bailey," he said, forcing a smile. "Class, please welcome Harry Bailey, a new transfer from Arcadia."

A girl with sky-blue pins in her heavily styled hair held up her hand. "Mr. Gladly, I feel threatened being in the same class as a Simurgh-influenced freak. Emma's dad says the school shouldn't be forcing us in the same class as him and he's going to sue. You need to let me skip."

Gladly didn't appear impressed. "I see. Well, Madison, as you might remember we actually discussed Mr. Bailey's situation early this semester in our class. He's been vetted by the Queen's Men in England and by the Protectorate here in the US. His entry into the US was sponsored by Legend himself. I don't think it can get any safer than that."

"Unless he's…like…I don't know…mind-warped them all or something," Madison said.

"Madison, you're welcome to leave if you wish, but it will count as an absence and you'll get an F for the day, so choose wisely. The same goes for anyone…"

Three students got up and left. Madison hesitated a moment before joining them. Gladly sighed tragically. Harry restrained an urge to roll his eyes. The tosspot opened that door and now tried to act the martyr for people walking through it. "Mr. Bailey, it appears several desks are open."

"Right, thanks."

He took one of the three open seats by the girl. The moment he sat, the song began chirping oddly at him. He felt a sensation of tiny legs skittering up and down his spine, almost as if he were being covered in insects. It was one of the creepiest feelings he could remember, almost as bad as the acidic burning sensation he had around Marko, and it all originated from the girl with her head down.

He listened, but never caught her name or even got a clear look at her face other than the fact she wore glasses. When the bell rang for lunch, she was on her feet and out the door before Harry could even close his spiral notebook. He quietly gathered his stuff and left the room, noting how the other students gave him such a wide berth.

It was going to be a long…

He saw her again between classes, cornered at the end of the call way by a stairwell just two classes down. It was the cutesy girl, Madison, the big-chested redhead from that morning (despite her making life hell, he tended to remember chests like hers), and none other than Sophia Hess. The three of them literally surrounded the bug girl, not touching but definitely restricting her movement. All three spoke over her as she stood there, head bowed, clutching her bag like a drowning woman clutching a flotation device in the water.

"…hear she was put on free lunches 'cause she's so poor." Cutesy Madison.

"She lost her history assignment, just pathetic," Red of the big boobs said.

"Nothing more than a worm," Sophia said. "God, if she had any pride at all she'd go off herself."

Harry frowned. _So, that's how it was._ The murderous cape was the school bully, which didn't actually surprise him at all. _Well, Coil wanted me to find capes for possible recruitment. What better time than now?_

"Not to interrupt your fun and all, but it doesn't take pride to off yourself usually," Harry said as he walked toward them. "Just a great deal of fear or an utter lack of interest in life. Last person I know did it because they were facing three months of chemo that wasn't going to make a difference in the end."

Three pairs of eyes turned to glare, while a forth peeked through a few loose strands of hair.

"Gah, get out of here you freak!" Red of the big boobs said.

"Why, afraid I'll give you my Simurgh lurgy?"

"What the hell is that?" Red said.

"Show me those big beautiful tatas of yours and I'll tell you," he said with a leering grin.

He shouldn't have been surprised by the explosion of violence Sophia Hess demonstrated. She didn't hold her swing either—it was a sharp, powerful jab meant to break more than just hurt.

Eight years living among supervillains had given Harry a certain facility in defense. He moved his head fractionally while slapping the fist to the side. He did not, however, hit back. He'd learned that, whether he was the victim or not, hitting a girl never turned out good for a boy. Not even in self-defense. No one ever, ever believed the boy. Short of murder, if a girl attacked a boy he was screwed either way.

"None of that, love," he said with a tight, forced grin.

Just blocking her bruised his arms.

She spun to send her other elbow heading straight for his temple. That would have left him unconscious on the floor. He backed away, but again didn't hit back. "You're a fast little minx, aren't you? Is that how you get your jollies, Hess? Beating up poor, defenseless transfer students? What'll I ever tell my cousin, you know, the Assistant Director of the PRT, if I ended up in the nurse's office?"

She pushed him; this time he didn't avoid it. "We're not done here, asshole," she snarled. "Not by a longshot."

Harry rubbed his chin. "Yeah, think we are, actually. Why don't you and your cronies there go be…somewhere else."

Hess's eyes darted from Harry to Taylor, and he could see realization dawning on her. "You're fucking kidding me."

"I don't know about the kidding part, but wouldn't mind the rest. You are a bit of a hot bird there, Hess." He grinned at her. "Red there's more stacked, though. Madison…not much going for her outside of the cutesy shite. You guys share or what?"

"Keep that mouth going," Sophia said. "I'll just add it to your tab. Come on, girls, let's leave the trash with the garbage."

Suddenly he was alone with the bug girl, who stared at him with a perfectly blank face. Now that she wasn't hunched over he was surprised to see she was actually his height, with a wide mouth and large eyes hidden behind a pair of black metal-rimmed glasses. She wore her dark, curly hair long, almost down to her shoulder blades. He couldn't say she was beautiful, but she was definitely distinctive.

He grinned at her and offered a hand. "Harry Bailey, a pleasure to meet you."

She didn't accept, only clutched her bag tighter. "Why?"

"Why what?"

"Why is it a pleasure to meet me? You don't know me; you've been in school less than a day. I saw Hess showing you around earlier, and she didn't leave because you beat her. Are you her new stooge? Trying to set me up again?"

"I…" Worse part was, he realized she wasn't that far off the mark. "Damn you're smart. I'm not her stooge, but yeah, she knows my guardian is an AD in the PRT. Probably doesn't want to get in trouble or something."

"Bullshit. Leave me alone."

She turned and stared down the stairs. He considered walking after her, but realized it wouldn't help. He considered himself fucked up, and he could recognize another fucked up person when he saw them.

"Right. Way to go, Harry."

* * *

A/N: As the name implies, part one, Genesis, is merely the beginning. By next chapter, we start seeing runes.


	7. Genesis 6

A/N: Chap 6 review responses are in my forums like normal. Thanks for reading.

* * *

 **Genesis 1.6**

Sophia had other friends. Of course she did. Aside from being a murderous cape, she was a beautiful, athletic girl. Such girls tended to know many equally athletic boys.

The boys who approached the bus stop after school wore letter jackets with highly stylized Ws on their breasts. All four wore gray hoodies under the jackets to ward off the cold. The smallest looked a couple of inches taller than Harry at six feet. The largest stood a head taller; all four had broad, powerful shoulders and ridiculously huge hands.

One had a panther tattoo that stood out in black against the back of his hand.

Yeah, this was going to be shite.

"Well, Hess did say I had a tab," Harry said to them, not even trying to play innocent. He put his book bag on the bench. "So, my lads, you going to come all at once like a pack of dogs, or is one of you man enough to fight fair?"

The tallest man's voice sounded like his vocal cords were made of granite. "What makes you think we give a shit about you?"

"Oh, well then, my apologies," Harry said with a wry smile. "You boys have a nice day."

He didn't believe it any more than they did. Short-and-built-like-a-brick-wall swung first. Harry had about as much chance of blocking a blow like that as he had stopping an avalanche. Instead, he spun out of the telegraphed punch's path and stomp-kicked the jock's knee. The older boy dropped with an angry shout.

Unfortunately, there were three others. The second jock caught Harry in a low blow to the stomach that ripped the breath out of him, while the third slammed an elbow into his back while he was bent over from the first. That took him to his knees on the cold sidewalk. The fourth—Mr. Mountain—took two steps like man about to make a penalty kick in football. That was a set of broken ribs if it connected.

Harry dropped flat to his stomach, pulled up his leg and kicked the boy's planted foot at the ankle. It didn't stop the kick, but stole much of its power even as it dropped the mountain with a pained shout.

He got another foot in his face from the second boy for his trouble. It didn't break his nose, but it definitely split a lip and left his head ringing.

Hands grabbed his coat and didn't just pick him up, but actually threw him back against the metal shade of the bus stop. He had a brief glimpse of the third boy coming in and then pain as a large, hard fist slammed into his stomach again.

Like a switch clicking, Harry suddenly shunted the pain aside as his brain moved into his dream-inspired Occlumancy. _Overly aggressive, no combat training but street-fighting experience. No lethal force, under orders to hurt not kill. Right, two inches._

Harry barely shifted to the right to miss a blow that could have broken his jaw. Instead, his attacker punched a metal pole. The sound of knuckles breaking cracked in Harry's ear, followed a split-second later by a pained "FUCK!"

Compared to these boys, Harry didn't have the upper body-strength to do much damage with his fists. But he had knees and legs and a few years of informal training at the hand of the UK's most successful Villains. He surged forward and brought his knee up not to the boy's stomach, but to the edge of his ribcage, breaking another bone.

 _Attacker behind, roll forward and pivot to kick._

He tried. Wrapped within Occlumancy, Harry's mind simply moved faster than his haphazardly trained body could follow. The kick to the back of his knee took him down, and the flurry of hits and kicks that followed ensured he stayed down.

He curled into a fetal ball, trying his best to protect vital organs and his nose. The pain was distant and alarming, but he knew pain well. He'd hurt for the next few weeks, but nothing was permanently damaged as far as he could tell.

"Fuck this shit!" Mountain said. "Fucker twisted my fucking ankle. Coach is gonna have my ass. Come on."

Harry risked looking up to see the four boys limping away. The first boy with the busted knee and the mountain with the twisted ankle were hanging on their third friend, the one with a clearly broken fist and likely a broken rib, while the fourth worked to keep them all upright.

Looking at them, he seriously considered taunting them. Four against one and he…shit. He _hurt._ "Never mind," he muttered. He picked himself up off the cement and checked out the torn jeans and jacket, his bloodied knuckles and a face that felt like it had been microwaved, if the throbbing was any indication. "Welcome to Winslow."

He sat on the bench and stared into space until the bus finally came.

~~Simurgh's Son~~

~~Simurgh's Son~~

"What happened to you?" Luke Casseus asked when Harry stumbled in right before dinner.

"Oh, you know, Winslow welcome committee," Harry said with a strained smile. "See the sights, make sure I know where everything is. Helpful bunch."

"Hmm-hmmm. How's the other guy look?"

"Guys. Four of them, your sized or bigger. And I'll have you know two were limping away, and the third had a broken fist and rib. Pretty good for a pint-sized bloke like myself."

Luke grinned and patted Harry's shoulders. "No doubt, Little Man. Boss wants you."

Harry's grin died. "Yeah, bet he does. You gonna eat with the grunts?"

Luke nodded. He was the only member of the Travelers who existed in both worlds—the soldiers didn't realize he was a cape, they thought he was just another of Coil's mercenaries. He went for the physical combat training. "See you there."

Harry made his way painfully down from the atrium, one floor below the apartments, where Coil kept his office. The office door was open and Coil was in full costume, mask on.

"Mr. Bailey," he said by way of greeting. "It appears Winslow did not agree with you."

Harry shrugged. "Pretty normal, truth be told."

"I understand you did have an interesting day otherwise," Coil said. Harry got the message clearly enough. Sophia Hess reported directly to Coil.

"Two capes so far." Harry said. He removed his phone and showed a picture of Hess first. As he suspected, there was no surprise at all.

The second garnered a little more reaction. "Name?"

"Taylor. Hebert, had to ask 'round for that. Suspicious as fuck. She saw me with Hess and told me to fuck off in so many words. You might want to call Hess off, if you have any influence. Hess has been riding her hard, might end up killing each other if we're not careful."

"Noted," Coil said in a bored tone. He forwarded the picture to himself from Harry's phone. "And?"

"Master. Five or six, maybe?" He didn't mention the Thinker aspect of her power. Didn't even consider it. "Controls bugs. I imagine this isn't a good time of year for her."

"Not unusual, some capes do have seasonal affiliations. I doubt we'll see Purity out and about until Spring."

Harry considered mentioning the situation that morning, dismissed it, and then changed his mind. "Pretty sure there are going to be protesters tomorrow morning," he said. "I set the metal detector off and the students realized who I was."

Though Harry couldn't see the man's face, he could see the outline of his brows rise. "Why did you set it off, Mr. Bailey? That's not exactly a good way to blend in."

"I've always set them off," Harry said with a helpless shrug. "Well, since I was eight. I don't know why. Anyway, I just wanted to warn you."

"Noted. You're dismissed."

Just like that, Coil had moved on.

~~Simurgh's Son~~

~~Simurgh's Son~~

"Shit, Luke said you'd taken a beating, but damn, Harry!" He glanced up from his notes as Marissa stepped into his room in a track suit. Her hair was tied back and she looked sweaty, as if she'd been working out. "Anything broken?"

"Other than my pride?" Harry shook his head. He had a split lip and a shiner that could light up the bay, but all the rest of the bruises were hidden by his clothes. "I'm fine. I'll feel like shit for a couple of weeks, but I'm fine. Won't be much fun for a few days, though. Sorry, love."

Marissa snorted but sat down beside him. She glanced at his notebook and the rune designs within. "You're still on those, huh?"

Harry nodded. "I can't explain it, but it just feels like these are important, you know? Maybe it's just the Simurgh fucking with my head again, but it feels like these would work for me. I just need to get them tattooed on, and maybe shit like today wouldn't happen as much.

"Hmm, look at this." She stood, and despite his physical pain Harry could help but get a little excited when she pulled down the front of her sweatpants and lifted her hoody, but only enough to reveal a beautifully rendered star tattooed around her navel.

It made him wish she'd let him have a light on when she choose to visit him at night, because it was the first time he'd ever seen it.

"That's really good work. Who did it?"

"Jess. She's done all of us, except Oliver. Now that he's pretty, he doesn't want anything messing it up."

Harry didn't know what that meant and had no idea what Oliver's power was, other than to look like a living, breathing Ken doll. "Do you think she could do something like this?"

"Only one way to ask. Think you can make it across the hall?"

"I might need a kiss for luck."

She kissed him, but… "Shit, should have asked for a flash," Harry muttered as his split lip stung.

Marissa laughed, and then to his utter delight complied, however briefly. "I think I can die happy now," he said with stars in his eyes.

She laughed again and helped him painfully to his feet to cross the hallway. Jess grudgingly finished her session on her console and wheeled over to look at his notebook. "You look like shit, by the way. You give as good as you got?"

"Four guys Luke's size or better, two limped away and there were broken bones," Harry said with a touch of pride.

Jess accepted that and then started studying his designs. Where Marissa looked lithe, pale and classically beautiful, Jess was heavier set in the torso, with frumpy dirty blond hair and several earrings in her right ear. Her legs looked like twigs, but her biceps were larger than Harry's. In a way, he knew she was the voice of common sense in her group. She wasn't the smartest or the strongest, but she was almost unflappably calm with a core strength and a wry sense of humor that Harry couldn't help but appreciate. Her song was one of change and renewal, but not like Vivaldi, hopeful and encouraging. More like Stravinsky—rebirth from death and pain; a rite she went through rather than a gentle process.

Unfortunately, he got the feeling she didn't really care for him, or the fact that he and Marissa occasionally slept together.

"This is insane," she muttered as she looked over them. "Where did you pull this crap from?"

"Oh, just dreamed it up one night," Harry said. "Think you could do it?"

"It would take months if not years," she said. "I mean, just guessing there are over a thousand of these symbols just for your left leg. I'm not even sure I could get the symbols that small, but even if I could it would take longer than I have. Sorry." She handed the sheets back to Harry, who shrugged and ran a hand through his wild hair.

"Yeah, I understand. Thanks for looking at it, though."

"Harry, you've been drawing those since I met you," Marissa said. "What do you think they'll do?"

He winced, struggling to explain it. "Well, I know it sounds crazy, but I think they'll protect me. Like, Brute-level resilience."

Jess snorted. "That's not the way powers work, Harry. You can't just tattoo a power on."

"I don't think it's a power. I think it's…it's magic."

While Jess snorted, Marissa at least tried to be more understanding. "You know magic doesn't exist, no matter what Myrddin likes to pretend."

"Sure it does," Harry countered. "How to you explain capes? They put fancy names on it, but it's still magic. You can make a bleedin' sun, Marissa. How is that not magic?"

He folded his designs back in his notebook. "Well, thanks for looking at it, Jess. I'll see you tomorrow after school."

He started to leave but Jess cleared her throat. "Harry, look. You know it won't work, but does it have to be a real tattoo?"

He paused. "I…don't know. I thought so. Why?"

Jess shrugged. "You could get a henna tattoo. It's drawn on, so it's much faster, and those last two to four weeks. It'd still take a couple of days, and you would have to pay me a lot, but I could probably draw these in Henna. It wouldn't hurt, but it wouldn't be permanent either in case…well, you know, in case it doesn't work."

"How much?"

"On something like this, I'd charge on the hour plus supplies. Say fifty bucks an hour, it'd probably take about fifteen to twenty hours. Plus I'd have to get a big applicator and the henna itself. Say a thousand even." She cleared her throat. "You'll have to tell me if you want _all_ the designs drawn. Some look like they're pretty intimate."

"Just don't take pictures or anything," Harry muttered. "I'll have to talk to Coil. Supposedly I'm getting paid. But I'd be willing to pay just to see if they work or not."

"Must be some dreams you have," Marissa said.

She was joking, but Harry shook his head. "You have no idea."

~~Simurgh's Son~~

~~Simurgh's Son~~

As much as Harry wanted to stay in his bed the next morning, he forced himself up and got ready for school. If the bullies knew they could keep him out, they'd make it even worse next time. It was only in the bathroom that he noticed the glorious black eye was the merest hint of blue. His split lip looked more chapped that anything. How had the swelling gone down so much?

He still hurt, but as he showered it amazed him that he didn't hurt more. Perhaps the boys didn't do as much damage as he initially thought?

He had to leave an hour before Marissa to make it to Winslow, and so he didn't get to see her. The small cafeteria Coil maintained for his on-site mercenaries was open, though, so Harry was able to wolf down a plate full of eggs, bacon and toast, washed down with admittedly good coffee. Coil fed his people well.

All things considered, Harry was actually feeling pretty good when he climbed into the bus. Those feelings fled in fear when he saw the protestors.

Yep, he'd forgotten about the protestors. Parents marched up and down the narrow, snowy lawn in front of the school with hastily drawn signs with a four-winged angel and messages such as "Not in my school!" and "Not with my kids!"

A man in a high-priced suit and fur-lined leather overcoat stood near the doors with a megaphone haranguing the whole group.

 _Bloody hell._

His Coil-issued phone buzzed. He looked down at a text bubble from Tattletale.

 _Go to the southwest entrance. For teachers. Students under special circumstances allowed per policy._

He didn't even bother asking how Tattletale knew what was going on. He texted back a quick _TY_ and made his way around the edge of the school property, bundled in his coat and hood, until he reached the teacher's parking lot. Surprisingly, he saw Mr. Gladly walking toward the school.

"Mr. G, good morning," Harry said as he jogged up behind the man.

Gladly blinked and looked over his shoulder in surprise. "Mr. Bailey, what are you doing here? This is the teacher's entrance."

Harry hitched a thumb at the protestors. "I'm not sure they wouldn't try to kill me. Took a bottle to the head when I started Leicester few years back, I'd really like to avoid that here if I could. I read that would fit under Special Circumstances, right?"

Gladly was far too liberal to be a truly good teacher, but in this case Harry was grateful for it. "Yeah. And it not, Jorge can see me. There's no good reason to send anyone through that. Come on, I'll pass you through."

"Thanks, Mr. G."

The day proceeded pretty much as Harry would expect, with the students giving him a wide berth. He got more than a few glares not just from the Panthers, but from other athletes as well, and wondered if he should anticipate another meeting at the city bus stop. The stop just happened to be off school grounds, so he wouldn't get any support there from the staff, even if they were so inclined. He somehow doubted they were.

He headed to the cafeteria to try and relieve Coil of as much money as he could eat. He sat in a corner of the last table against the back wall, finishing up his rune sketches for his Friday night appointment with Jess while consuming mass quantities of food.

A song of shadows and screaming was all the warning he had to look up and see Sophia Hess glaring down at him. He hadn't heard or seen her approach at all. He met her gaze squarely. "You think you're strong?" she demanded.

Harry shrugged. "Strength is relative. There are battles you can win, and some you can't. Some battles have to be fought no matter what. I won't always win, Hess, but I'm sure not going to make it easy."

"Hebert is _mine,_ " Sophia said, eyes blazing. "Stay the fuck out of it, stay the fuck away from me and mine. Or next time it's going to be the whole fucking football and basketball team."

He could have asked her why, but it didn't really matter. Bullies had their victims, and until the victims fought back, that wouldn't change. "She wouldn't want my help anyway," he admitted. "Consider me out of your way."

"You got balls, Bailey," she said grudgingly. "Don't make me have to cut them off." With that, she turned and walked back to the jock's section of the cafeteria.

"Pity her prom date," he muttered before returning to his meal.

~~Simurgh's Son~~

~~Simurgh's Son~~

That Friday evening found Harry shivering with more than just cold as he stood in front of two girls wearing nothing but a bathrobe and, underneath that, a very, very thin jockstrap.

"He's kinda skinny for you, is all I'm saying," Jess said.

The commentary didn't help either.

Marissa sighed. "He's not skinny."

Jess rolled her eyes. "Well, might as well get started. Remove your robe and lay on the table. You can use that towel to keep warm any parts I'm not working on. I'm going to work just on the front and sides of your legs tonight, alright?"

"Yes, ma'am."

Jess snorted. "I ain't no ma'am."

"You are tonight," Harry said. "Doesn't matter if I'm paying you or not. This…this means a lot to me. So thank you."

"See, Jess," Marissa said, as if proving a point.

"Right. So, disrobe."

Still shivering, Harry let the robe drop and knelt down on the table. It looked like a massage table, but one only two feet off the ground, which made it much easier for Jess to work on him.

"Okay, going to start on your feet. Are you ticklish?"

"Er, I have a trick for that, should be fine."

Marissa whistled. "You have a trick to stop being ticklish?"

"Yeah. Something I dreamed about one night."

Marissa stepped past Jess and sat down next to the head of the table. She handed Harry a thick SAT study guide. "Okay, start on page 53."

"Right. A train is heading toward Boston at eighty miles an hour and…" He continued reading as Jess started drawing the complex symbols from his designs onto the soles of his feet with a sure, practiced hand. The applicator was a thin needle-like tube attached to a coiled plastic hose that was in turn connected with a larger bladder of henna ink.

He imagined a mental _click_ and suddenly his thoughts felt more streamlined, and the data flowing in from the soles of his feet constrained and distant. Once Jess was assured he wasn't going to kick or wiggle, she got to work.

Sunk within a realm of occlumency he only knew about because of memories that did not belong to him, Harry was able to pass the five hours easily. When Jess got to his thigh and casually moved his whole leg to one side and started writing on the inside of his thigh, while the back of her hand rested against his package, he didn't even blink.

She didn't either, entirely unfazed.

By the time midnight rolled around, both of his legs were covered in henna ink-drawn runes from the soles of his feet all the way up to his navel. He stared down at them with a gaping jaw, momentarily overcome by memories that weren't his.

"They're perfect," he said. And they were, each symbol drawn exactly as he wrote.

Jess nodded and rubbed her eyes. "Should be. Okay, we're done for now. Stay here for tonight, wash it off in the morning. Should make a nice, deep stain that'll last a while."

"Thanks, Jess!" Harry said. She turned and rolled out of the room, pausing only long enough to hit an automatic door switch. Marissa stood, took his study guide, and then kissed him sensually. "Too bad we don't want to mess up the tattoos," she whispered with a grin, even as she kissed him.

She backed away, frowning. "You're lip. It looks a lot better."

Harry shrugged. "I'm a quick healer. Have to be, with all the trouble I get into."

"Good." She leaned down and kissed him again.

"Killing me here," Harry grinned back.

She left the room, sauntering with a saucy grin over her shoulder, before she left and closed the door behind her.

Harry stayed where he was, studying the myriad runes on his legs. "Perfect," he whispered. He closed his eyes and just like always, from horrid day when the Simurgh came, his whole consciousness was enveloped in the memories of an immortal wizard named Harry Potter.


	8. Genesis 7

A/N: Review responses are available in my forums as normal. Thanks for reading.

* * *

 **Genesis 1.7**

Saturday morning, after a huge breakfast, Harry approached Luke. "Hey, you and the grunts do fighting drills in the morning, right?"

"Yeah."

"Think I could join?"

Luke considered Harry's size. He was average for a boy his age, which put him inches and many pounds smaller than Coil's typical mercenary. "We do Krav Maga. It's not easy on the body."

Harry shrugged. "My life's not easy. I just want to get better."

The answer seemed to be what Luke was looking for. "Okay, I'll clear it with Dimitri."

"Thanks!"

Dimitri turned out to be one of the smaller men, but like the others walked with a sense of coiled energy, as if every move could kill. He looked Harry up and down before glancing at Luke. "Boss cleared it?"

"Boss doesn't care, it's your call," Luke said casually. "He's on salary, same as us. If Empire 88 goons come spilling in here, wouldn't hurt to have another hand."

Harry's mind clicked. _Bunching thigh muscles, heel has set. Left jab, two inches right._

Faster than a snake, Dimitri snapped out a punch with his off arm. Harry barely dodged his head to the right, slapping the arm away.

The mercenary nodded as he relaxed. "Good reflexes. You fight before?"

"I learned a few things from a former SAS drill instructor in Leicester. Worked for my previous… er, boss."

"What'd he tell you?"

"That I was a lousy weak tosser not fit to suck my mama's teats. I think I was fourteen."

Dimitri smiled, but it was actually hard to tell. "Smart man. Okay, you can join us. We're not going to go easy, but no harder either."

"All I can ask. Thank you, sir!"

~~Simurgh's Son~~

~~Simurgh's Son~~

Harry was very, very sore, but pleased regardless when he went to Jess's room that evening. "Luke said you did really good," Marissa said as she joined them. Harry was on his stomach, essentially naked, as Jess worked on the backs of his legs and buttocks.

"Dimitri was unusually cool for an evil henchman," Harry admitted. "Still hurt, but I think I learned a lot."

He felt Marissa run a hand through his hair and made purring noises that set her to laughing.

"Enjoy it while you can," Jess said. "You know you're going to have to shave your head for these designs, right?"

"Yeah," Harry said. He wasn't worried, he was excited. They were more than halfway through!

~~Simurgh's Son~~

~~Simurgh's Son~~

Early the next morning he knocked on Luke Casseus' door. The large young man was dressed in a pair of loose house pants and nothing else. Staring at row after row of perfectly defined muscle, Harry suddenly felt very small. "Holy shit, I want to be you when I grow up," he whispered.

Ballistic laughed. "No training on Sundays. Whatch'ya need, little man?"

"Er, this is going to sound really strange, but I couldn't help but notice your hair style."

"Yeah, that's okay to notice."

"Would you be willing to shave my head? I did my pits, but I'm not sure about my head."

Luke raised one brow in a silent inquiry. Then shrugged. "Mars said you were treatin' her alright. Just so you know, Mars and me are good friends."

"I get it," he said. "I have a feeling she'd break my heart before I could ever think about breaking hers."

"Right. Well, come on. We'll do the electric first, then the razor to take off the stubble. Gotta tell you, though, Harry, I don't think it'll look as good on you as it does me."

"Luke, you're like GQ handsome. I could strap ten million on a diamond and gold chain around my neck and I still wouldn't look as good to a girl as you do just standing there."

Luke laughed again and led Harry into his room.

An hour later, when he felt relatively confident she was awake, he knocked on Jess's door. The door opened to reveal her at a computer on a video conference with someone in a dark, enclosed space. "Gotta go, Noelle," she said quickly. "Talk to you soon."

"Right." The other girl had a pretty face, but drawn with exhaustion and lack of light.

"Sorry for barging in," Harry said, feeling guilty. "I can come back."

She turned and blinked tiredly at him. "Holy shit, you shaved."

"Well, yeah. I was…would you accept another five hundred in return for finishing today?"

She motioned for him to shut the door and come in. He did so. Before he could say anything, she reached back to computer and typed in a quick command before shutting it down. "You really believe in this shit, don't you?" she finally asked. "You really think these runes are going to do something?"

He bowed his head for a second before he walked over and sat on the seat. "You know the story about the Simurgh and me, right?"

"Story? The photo of the Simurgh reaching for you was on the cover of Time Life. The photographer won a Pulitzer."

Harry remembered—he'd seen the photo of himself a hundred times or more. The photo of the Simurgh looming over a kneeling, weeping little boy in the London attack of '03 captured the hopelessness and despair that Endbringers caused even more powerfully than images of the destroyed cities. The death toll in New York, Seattle or Moscow was simply too big for ordinary people to wrap their minds around. But a boy kneeling just a few feet from his dead parents with the Simurgh herself reaching down to destroy him was something that needed no explanation; no statistics were necessary to convey the utter horror of that moment.

 _He hated that photo._

"Yeah, what they don't tell you is that two months later the photographer walked into Piccadilly Circus with an assault rifle and a vest full of explosives." Harry ran a hand over his bald head. "Thing is, her song really did fuck me up. There I was, just climbed out of the car where my parents were dead, and this monster was floating right there singing this horrid song at me I could only hear in my head. And…and…I saw things."

"Like monsters?"

"Monsters. Spaceships. Gods. Magic. I saw galaxies collide. Shit beyond description. And I see it every damn time I close my eyes. I haven't actually slept since I was eight."

Jess blinked at him. "Wow."

"Thing is, I learn from the memories. That trick to keep from being ticklish? It does a whole lot more. I learned it from a dream. That's why I think this might work too. I mean, if one thing I dreamed about works, this should too, right?"

Jess shrugged. "I suppose."

"I think something bad is going to happen." Harry fund himself whispering. "I don't know when, but soon. I…I don't really want to die, Jess. My life's been shit—I've been a slave to villains since I was twelve. I have nothing to live for, but I don't want to die. This…I'm hoping this will save me. Please, will you?"

"Does Marissa know?"

"What, that I'm even a bigger freak than people thing?"

She scowled. "I'm in a fucking wheelchair, Bailey. Don't play the pity card with me."

"Oh, you're right. Sorry. No, I just told her I was buggered in the head. 'S true, you know."

Jess studied him for a long time before finally nodding. "Fine. Take your shirt off. We'll finish today. You know there's a missing spot in designs for your chest, right?"

"Yeah, I know. It's part of the pattern."

"Okay. Let's go, I have a doctor's appointment this afternoon."

Harry quickly stripped off his shirt and laid down to let her work.

~~Simurgh's Son~~

~~Simurgh's Son~~

Late that afternoon, Harry left the many hall cameras for one of the main bathrooms on the staging level the soldiers used. He slipped in while the rest were to going dinner and went to a stall at the end. He'd been hiding in his room since Jess finished, hoping not too many people would see his tattoo-covered head.

His cover story was that he did it as a prank for his Craft of War avatar. He was prepared to spout that lie to anyone who asked.

Inside the stall, he took off his shirt and looked down at his own chest. A circle of exposed skin stood right over his sternum, but nearly every other inch of his body was covered in tattoos.

"Please let this work," he prayed.

In truth, the prayer wasn't just for the runes to work. The runes represented something far, far more important to him. They represented magic. They represented sanity. He couldn't know for sure if he hadn't triggered somehow during the attack and the Queen's Men just missed it. He didn't know if all his visions were real, or just one huge mind-fuck from the Simurgh.

But these runes were magic. Real magic, like right out of the last of his memories of Harry Potter. He had vivid memories of the almost alien-looking wives developing and then tracing them lovingly onto Harry Potter's body.

He didn't have a wand, nor any witches to draw the runes for him. But the shapes themselves were merely receptacles for power. With the shapes drawn on his skin, if what he remembered was true, he just needed to charge the runes themselves.

"Please," he whispered one more time.

He placed his hand against the bare spot on chest, and almost immediately he felt something that shouldn't have been there—a circle of gold etched with tiny runes surrounding an amethyst as large as his palm. The amethyst itself felt like it had been quartered by some precise chisel, with each quarter bearing a strange symbol he couldn't quite make out. He hadn't seen it since he was eight years old.

It was back. He pushed his palm down, and then dreamed of magic and _willed_ his intent.

For the very first time in his life, he could _feel_ something inside him. It felt like a giant raging bonfire inside his mind and chest that made him gasp as power burned through him. He grunted and fought back a cry as magic flowed from his arm into the amulet. From there it exploded out across the runes themselves.

He couldn't see the runes' reflection, but he could see the brilliant orange-white light each rune generated reflected in the smooth metal of the stall door. The glow covered his head and ran down his body to the very tips of his toes and fingers, burning hotter and hotter until he thought he was going to melt into goo.

Abruptly it was over. The light went out and he was left gasping desperately for breath.

"Bailey, you in there? You gonna eat, man?" That was Ballistic. He was the only one other than Marissa or Jess who would care enough to check on him.

"Be right there, thanks!"

He stood up, fighting against a light-headed feeling. He pulled his thick shirt on and left the stall. Ballistic was already gone, having returned to his own meal. Harry started to follow until he caught a glimpse of a head of wild, black hair in the mirror. He blinked and stepped forward, stunned to see his head furry once more. But more importantly, the henna tattoos were gone! He glanced down at his arm, frowning in alarm, until he spun his forearm just right and saw the faintest shimmer of something on his skin.

"It worked," he whispered. "Holy fucking buggering shit it worked!"

He ran out of the room, almost dying to tell everyone, but then stopped. Who could he tell? Jess. Marissa. Maybe Ballistic, if he cared. Every other person in that base might someday be called on to shoot him.

With that sobering thought, he forced himself to walk calmly to the communal kitchen and piled a tray full of food, suddenly famished. The Travelers, being capes, usually ate in their apartments. They had their own section that let them go civilian in private, but in the base section they wore their costumes. Only Luke in his mercenary guise hung out with the troops.

He sat by the older, large boy, who gaped at his head. "Dude, that is a helluva wig," he said. "Looks just like the real thing."

"Thanks," Harry forced a grin. "You were right about not looking good. This should hold me over." He then laid into his meal.

That evening, he retreated to his room to finish up all the homework he should have done earlier, but didn't. He was just fishing when Marissa stepped inside. Jess followed, and the door closed behind them.

"Holy shit," Marissa whispered.

Harry stared first at his girlfriend? Lover? Then at Jess. "What?"

"Your tattoos, dipshit," Jess said.

Oh. OH. "Fuck, yeah, I forgot with homework." He closed up his books for school the next day and walked over to Jess and knelt down enough to show his skin. "It works, I think. I tried hitting my arm with a stick earlier and it didn't hurt at all. Not sure how powerful it is, though."

Jess ran a hand over it. "I can't feel a thing. Hell, I can barely even see it, though I know that henna couldn't have washed off on its own yet. And you're hair grew back overnight! I can't believe it."

Impulsively, he leaned forward and hugged her. "Thank you!"

He leaned back, leaving her sputtering a little. He then hugged Marissa, who accepted it with a smile and a kiss. "So, do you want to test it?" she asked.

"How?"

"I'm called Sundancer for a reason."

"Not here, though," Jess said. "You kick up your power you'll fry the electronics on our floor. The only place you could light up would be the third floor, and that would just get Coil mad."

 _Third floor. Tattletale was right, they both knew what was down there._

"Then let's…" Marissa began.

Jess blew a strand of hair from her face. "Mars, chill. Seriously. You know how Coil gets when his pet capes go out after dark. He's trying to keep our affiliation secret—PRT thinks were still in Boston with Accord. Just wait until the weekend and we'll drive out to the Docks or the graveyard and test there. We can set up some controls and really see how it works." She then leaned forward and whispered, "Without cameras everywhere."

 _Oh._ "Yeah, I can live with that," Harry said.

Marissa sighed. "Oh, alright." She then grinned at Harry and waggled her eyebrows. "Do you shimmer all over, Harry?"

"Only one way to find out," he grinned back.

Jess huffed. "God you guys are sickening. I'm out of here. Don't stay up too late, kids." Jess hit the automated door switch that Harry now knew was in every room on the second level and left.

That night, after Marissa returned to her room, Harry's phone buzzed. He flipped it open to see Tattletale's text box.

 _Coil's increased surveillance. TF is a no-go at the moment._

Her text bubble disappeared, and moments later so did any trace that she'd contacted him. He had no idea how she did it, but it was pretty convenient given how Coil checked his phone.

~~Simurgh's Son~~

~~Simurgh's Son~~

The protestors finally gave up shortly before Spring Break. Harry was almost sorry he had to go back to using the main entrance, though at least now the school cops knew to let him get a manual search rather than setting the metal detector off again.

When Harry didn't cause the school to spontaneously implode or drive everyone into suicidal rampages, things calmed down and Harry Bailey became just another fact of life, like the gangs or the crack being sold in all the boy's bathrooms on a schedule that just managed to offset with Vice Principal Martinez's inspection schedule. Whichever bathroom Martinez inspected at lunch was the one bathroom that didn't have dealers.

From the sidelines, Harry watched as Sophia, Emma Barnes (her father led the protests) and Madison whatever-the-hell-her-name-was continued their bullying campaign against Taylor Hebert.

It was painful to watch. He wanted Taylor to turn and just start lashing out. She looked like she had a good reach on her, and some powerful legs. He bet she could beat the snot out of Emma or Madison. Probably not Sophia, but he knew she could at least stand up for herself.

Even better, he wanted to see her use her bugs. He'd love to see an army of roaches crawling all over cutesy little Madison, or flies in Emma Big-Chest Barnes's hair.

Sophia frankly deserved wasps, but he'd take what he could get.

Hebert didn't, though. She took it in silence, standing still with a blank face like a statue as Sophia, Emma and Madison tore into her. Worse yet, the teachers saw it happening but just didn't care. Harry supposed with crack and meth flowing like water from the bathrooms and gangs openly eyeing each other on the verge of open warfare in the halls, one girl being bullied didn't seem that important.

The one other time he tried to reach out to Taylor, she rebuffed him again. "You won't make things better, you'll just cause them to escalate. Just stay out of it." She then turned her back on him and walked away.

Her refusal to fight back didn't just make him sad for her, it infuriated him. So, as she requested, he stayed out of it and got on with his life as best he could.

~~Simurgh's Son~~

~~Simurgh's Son~~

His alarm brought him out of his memories Saturday morning before the sun rose, which given how far north they were was just a few minutes before seven. He stood and made his way into the shower. He'd noticed that since he had the runes he didn't really develop much in the way of body odor or sweat at all. It was as if the runes kept his skin the perfect temperature and perfectly clean.

The shower mainly was to wash his hair, and to wake up. Warm water was almost as important as a strong black morning tea for him to get his day started.

Marissa never actually spent the night with him. She came to him two or three times a week, but always returned to her room afterward like a boarding school student sneaking back to her dorm. He didn't ask why nor press the issue for fear the visits would stop entirely. He began to wonder if she came because she had feelings for him, or if she was just using him to scratch an itch.

He then dismissed is as utterly unimportant. He was having regular sex with a beautiful woman, the reasons why didn't matter at all.

She was waiting for him at the head of the stairs in heavy jeans, turtleneck and a bright blue coat and hood. "Jess is already heading toward the garage. We're going clothes shopping."

 _Even Marissa and Jess had to justify leaving_ The Coil Evil Lair of Doom™.

The two walked side-by-side, just enjoying each other's company, until they reached the garage. Jess was already by an old white van with a chair lift that dominated the back. Harry climbed into the passenger side, while Marissa drove.

"I found a real good spot," Jess said from the back. "No GPS on our phones, nothing to track. I'll direct you."

They stopped long enough to get breakfast sandwiches from King Burger, which looked a lot like their hamburgers but with more egg and a pork sausage patty instead of a hamburger patty, and then proceeded across the Docks section of town until they reached a long stretch of abandoned dilapidated warehouses along a wide open stretch of cement that looked directly out into the boat graveyard that spelled the end of the shipping industry in Brockton Bay.

"Second one to the left," Jess directed.

The van pulled up, and to Harry's shock Ballistic stepped out of the door in full costume—bulky armor plates at various points over his black body-stocking, painted a navy blue. He used an undecorated square steel mask to hide his face. In the driver's seat, Marissa winked at Harry before stripping off her coat to reveal a very well-tailored suit of black body armor with streaks of red, and red stars placed strategically around her body. She slipped on her V-visor helmet and suddenly became Sundancer.

Harry turned to Jess, waiting to see what she did. "For the record, if you tell anyone about my power, I'll kill you." Worse yet, she wasn't joking.

"You've seen my man-bits," Harry said. "You have more power over me than Coil."

She snorted, but then smiled. "You're a good kid, Harry. I just…it's just…we're taking a huge risk for you. If Francis found out…"

Harry nodded. Francis, or Trickster in his costume, was an asshole. None of his team liked him, but all seemed to owe him something they wouldn't discuss with anyone else, not even him.

Jess flipped a toggle on her wheelchair, and suddenly the back support leaned back and the legs extended almost like a La-Z-Boy chair. She closed her eyes, and moments later a body appeared right outside the door.

"Oh, you shite," Harry said as he found himself staring at a wildly exaggerated, naked Marissa.

"Genesis, you bitch, cut it out!" Sundancer called.

The naked, super-busty Marissa winked at Harry and then disappeared with a pop. A second later, a new body formed of a perfect female body with breasts that had no nipples, a face that had eyes, ears and a mouth, but no nose or hair, and was the color of paper.

"Hey, can I touch?" Harry asked eagerly as he climbed out and approached the body.

Genesis shrugged, and with that Harry walked up, cupped one of the breasts and let it bounce. "Oh, this is fun. Ballistic, you gotta try this!"

Luke laughed. "Already have, little man. Come on, let's get this party started."


	9. Genesis 8

A/N: Previous chapter review responses are in my forums as normal. Thanks for reading.

* * *

 **Genesis 1.8**

The warehouse sat empty. The only light came from the many holes that perforated the sagging roof. In the far back, he could see abandoned offices and what might have been other rooms stacked up in two levels all the way to the roof girders.

The cement floor had weeds growing in the cracks and years of detritus piled around. Ballistic, having arrived first, set up a cheap folding table in a space cleared in the middle. Forty or so metal ball bearings were arranged according to their size, some the size of peas, the last few as big as bowling balls. Those made Harry nervous.

"This is going to be a series of controlled test for Harry's magical runes," Jess said. "We're going start with low-energy to high energy kinetics and then move onto thermal and EM tolerances."

"We're not recording this, Genesis," Marissa said. "You don't have to talk like you're in a research lab."

The generated body flipped her off. "Deal with it. The three of us are here without permission from either Coil or Trickster, and we intend to keep this secret. Are we agreed?"

"Yeah," Ballistic said firmly.

"Absolutely," Sundancer said.

"Yeah, definitely. But…um…damn. It's going to sound ungrateful, but why do this for me?"

"No one should be a slave." Ballistic's voice rang deep and strong with conviction, and Harry realized no one else needed to explain.

"Yeah. Thank you, guys. I can't…" He cleared his throat. "Thank you."

"Thank us later, if you can still walk," Ballistic said. "You know what low-level kinetics means, right?"

"Probably something in the way of a right hook, I'd guess."

"Got it."

Not surprisingly given their morning exercise routines, Ballistic knew how to fight. Just like Sophia Hess used efficiency of movement to maximize her strength, Ballistic moved with a trained expertise that made the use of his already considerable muscle.

His first punch to Harry's gut pushed him back two feet. It did not, however, cause him to bend over in pain.

"Holy shit," Sundancer said. "Ballistic did you…"

"Full strength," he reported.

Genesis nodded. "The blunt force was absorbed, but not the momentum. Try hitting his face."

Harry grinned when Ballistic snapped off a powerful uppercut. He stopped grinning when his head snapped back, but again he felt the impact as a distant, abstract thing. His head didn't hurt even with the sudden motion.

Next came kicks. Ballistic spun on his heel in an artistic display of a classic power side-kick that sent Harry stumbling back until he fell, but again it didn't actually hurt.

"Okay, time to move it up," Jess said.

"Everyone back up," Ballistic warned. Jess and Sundancer did so. Harry did too, but in the opposite direction. "Little man, I'm going to start with the pea-shooters first, low power. Gonna feel like a BB gun. I have five of each size, and I'm going to start low and get more juice until I run out, or you tell me. If you start to feel it, tell me. My power can kill."

"Right, got it. Thanks, L…Ballistic."

Ballistic fired the first one. Harry couldn't even tell where it hit. The second was the same. By the third he could feel a light tap on his leg. By the fourth and fifth, Harry realized he was being shot with the equivalent of a small caliber rifle, but felt nothing but what he might feel if Marissa tapped him.

"That last one could have gone through even a Brute 1," Ballistic said with a shake of his head. "Damn, Harry, whatever you did I want it too. Moving up."

The larger the projectiles, the more they made Harry stumble or fall back, but it always felt more like a shove than shot. He still worried about the bowling balls, but so far the runes were everything he dreamed of and more.

"Okay, last round," Ballistic said. "You still up for it?"

"Er, yeah, just you know…don't aim too low."

Genesis and Sundancer both laughed; Ballistic just shook his head and launched the first bowling ball-sized metal ball.

It hit hard enough to make Harry stumble back to the floor. It rolled off his chest with a loud clang, joining the rest of the balls. He got up and flexed. "I'm good," he reported.

The second send him flying back three yards. "I'm good!"

The fourth took him several seconds to actually walk back from not from pain, but just the distance it made him fly. "I'm good!"

The three Travelers just stared. "Listen Little Man…Harry. I've got one big ball left, and plenty of juice. I'll admit I haven't juiced it up to full. I could take Alexandria out of the air at full power. She'd shrug it off, sure, but I could knock her down. You think…?"

"I've gotta know," Harry said, though his heart felt like it was about to beat right out of his chest. "Give it everything you've got."

Harry didn't even see it coming. The ball actually glowed so that all he saw was a streak of red before he was suddenly flying backward. The surprise of it ripped a cry from his lips, but that was all—just surprise. He was distantly aware of flying through the wall behind him, and then through the wall of the dilapidated warehouse behind that, before slamming into the floor. He looked down and saw a perfectly circular hole in his shirt, but his skin below was unblemished. The deformed, squashed bowling ball had fallen a few feet away.

"Harry!" Sundancer screamed his name as she ran through the hole he made, with Ballistic a step behind. Both paused when Harry stood, grinning wildly.

He then ran to Sundance and lifted her in an enthusiastic hug. "It works! It works, Sundancer!"

"Jesus," Ballistic said, astonished. "I gave it all the juice I could. That could've taken out a sky scraper. Damn, Little Man!"

The three made their way back to the first warehouse, pausing only long enough for Luke to pick up the flattened bearing ball. He stared at it in his hands as if it were from an alien planet.

"That is almost Brute-nine or even ten resilience," Genesis said as she watched them return. "Amazing. Okay, well, next comes the dangerous part." She reached under the table and removed four pairs of welder goggles. "Safety first."

Luke put the goggles on over his mask; Sundancer's visor provided her protection and Genesis' body was fake. Only Harry remained, so he slipped his on as well.

Sundancer looked at Harry intently. "My power is really dangerous," she said somberly. "I've…I've killed people with it by accident, before I learned how to control it. Please…please be careful."

Facing the sincerity of her warning, he could only nod. She stepped away until she reached the left of center of the building. She took a deep breath, set her feet and shoulders, and then lifted her right hand.

Abruptly, it was day inside the warehouse. The spot of light was the size a baseball, but the energy, light and heat produced from it illuminated the entire warehouse better than stadium lights. Even from twenty feet away he could feel a rush of hot air flowing from the spot. The air around it shimmered in circles, almost like a heat-induced rainbow.

"That's amazing," Harry whispered. "What do I do?"

"Get as close to it as you can, then back away the moment you feel any heat or pain," Genesis said.

Through the heavily polarized goggles, the light appeared as a baseball sized dot of pure white. He started walking toward it slowly, one measured step at a time. He could feel strange sensations flowing around him—a field that simultaneously pushed against him while pulling him too. It felt like feathers tickling him.

Ten feet from the ball, the air began to shimmer around him with the heat. He glanced over at Sundance and saw she was the same distance. Her power protected her, but he knew without his runes he would have been gasping for breath and burning.

"This is amazing." Only when he spoke did he become aware of how _loud_ her power was, because it drowned out his voice entirely. It made a deep, almost visceral buzz of electromagnetic fields that surrounded the small burst of fusion energy.

Whether she could hear him or not, she nodded him.

Two steps in, his clothes caught fire. He didn't even realize it until he saw his sleeve burning. He glanced down, alarmed, but he didn't feel any pain. The heat was an abstract.

Being naked, not so much. He stood another step, and for the first time since he powered them, he saw the runes on his skin. They'd begun to take on a slight golden glow. He was only three feet away from Sundancer's power-produced star.

He lifted his arm and stared. Abruptly he realized all his clothes were gone now. The larger, circular runic arrays on his inner thighs, cheeks and temples seemed to be protecting those sensitive areas that didn't have runes, but he did find it difficult to breathe. The small star was vaporizing the oxygen.

He took a deep breath, and then crossed the three remaining feet to the star. His runes were now glowing, though he was sure the light of them was lost against the brilliance of Sundancer's star. He reached out a hand toward it, just out of curiosity, but the sheer magnetic fields made it feel almost like he was trying to push two positive magnets together.

Abruptly the light disappeared. The silence was made profound by the buzzing's absence. Harry looked down at his naked body and saw all the glowing runes begin to fade back into his skin.

He looked up to see Marrissa approaching, her mask off and her blue eyes wide. "My God, Harry," she whispered. She stepped closer and touched his chest. "You're not even hot to the touch."

Genesis joined them, but Ballistic thankfully arrived with a blanket that he draped around Harry's shoulders. "That was fucking fantastic," he enthused. "Hell, that was…"

"Beyond Brute 10 resilience," Genesis replied. She sounded somber. "Harry, that's Endbringer resilience. Those runes of yours could save lives."

He forced his smile to stay up, but inside he quailed. The runes were powered by a witch or wizard's magic. They themselves were simply symbols until charged. And yet… This wasn't the world in his dreams. In his dreams, there were witches and wizards who later evolved into mages. There were never any capes or Endbringers or powers like that he saw Sundancer provide. He knew the Mages in his dreams could duplicate her power, but it would have taken technology more advanced than what he had available.

Perhaps the magic requirement didn't apply here.

"Then we need to test it on someone else," he said simply. "And if it works, we… Who would we give it to, Genesis? Keep it just for ourselves? What about Endbringer fights? Who would we give it to?"

"I'll tell you what we do," Ballistic said. "If it works, Harry, you sell it to the Protectorate. Shit like this should be worth tens of millions if not more. You sell it, you make your money, and you get the fuck away from Coil or us."

 _Or us._ "I don't…what do you mean? Wouldn't you guys come with me? Or hell, share it with me? I mean, we're all involved. Yes, they're my runes, but Jess, you made it happen. Marissa you…"

"We're committed to something else," Marissa said. "Our friend is…"

Genesis opened her mouth to protest, but Ballistic put a hand on her shoulder. "Jess, after today, I trust him."

"Our friend Noelle is really sick," Marissa said with that tacit approval from her friends. "Everything we're doing is because Coil has promised to help her. He's given her a place that's safe, and is researching ways to help her and get us…where we need to be."

Harry nodded slowly, absorbing it. "I won't tell anyone. Anything. Thank you, for trusting me, and for all this. But guys…you know why he wants me, right? He's a cape too."

"A Thinker," Genesis said.

"Maybe. The song I hear is of universes and probabilities. He knows exactly what to say, and exactly what to do, to get what he wants. But he lies. He's not going to let me go; I knew that the moment I saw him. When he's done with me, he plans to put a bullet in my head because I know his civilian identity. That's why I wanted these runes so bad. Tattletale's the same way. Have any of you seen his real face?"

All three nodded.

"I just… I think that if I do get money for this, it's yours too. I don't need that much, but it sounds like you guys do. We share it, even split four ways, and you guys use your share to help your friend and to…to get home."

The three simply stared at him. "You're a good man, Bailey," Ballistic finally said.

He winced inside with the knowledge the magic probably wasn't going to work for them. He honestly didn't know if his slim hope was better than no hope at all.

~~Simurgh's Son~~

~~Simurgh's Son~~

Because of his already shaved head and the fact that the henna tattoos would not stand out quite as starkly on his henna-colored skin, Luke Casseus volunteered to be a control subject for Harry's runes. Harry donated his designs gladly, and continued to hope for the remainder of the week that they would work.

With Luke's striker/blaster power, being impervious would make him comparable to Alexandria in all but flight.

Jess finished Luke's tattoos the following Thursday. The next Saturday, near the end of February, they went back to their warehouse and Harry put his hand on the empty circle on Luke's chest that, on Harry, was the key of the ward structure. He tried charging it with that roaring feeling in his own chest.

Nothing happened. It felt like he was trying to put toothpaste back in its tube. The older man's body just wouldn't accept the magic. In fact, he winced and stepped back from Harry a little. "You okay?" Harry asked, worried.

Luke, though, was staring at him intently. "Little Man, you are a cape. I don't care what they told you, I could feel you trying to push something in me. It wasn't working, it just hurt."

Harry's shoulders slumped. "Guys, I'm sorry. I hoped…I mean…" He looked down and caught just the faintest shimmer of his runes. "In my dream, it was a whole race. They had power, but it wasn't like a cape's power. The runes…they worked off the person's own power. I hoped that I could…well, you know. Make it work for you."

"We had to test it," Genesis said, though she didn't try hiding her own disappointment. "Harry, these dreams of yours. Do they show you other things? Have you actually tried dreaming about things that could help your situation?"

He opened his mouth, but then slammed it shut as the full import of what she said rattled his brain. "Holy shit," he whispered. "I did that mind trick, sure, but I was so caught up on the Runes I didn't even…I just…I thought I was going nuts, you know? But the Runes worked, so that means everything else has to work too."

"Just be careful," Genesis warned. "Coil can't find out."

"Yeah, I know," Harry said.

~~Simurgh's Son~~

~~Simurgh's Son~~

On the Friday before Spring Break, Harry responded to a summons and stepped into Coil's office. The man was again in full costume, with only his mask off. He didn't look up from whatever memo he was proof-reading.

"The Medhall Corporation is holding a camp over Spring Break for certain high school students in the Brockton Bay area. It is by invitation only, but I've managed to procure you one. I have suspicions that I would like you to confirm. For this mission, you'll be fitted with a pair of glasses that have a built in camera with a Blue-tooth activation switch that will be on the button of your left sleeve. You will also be blonde, and fitted with blue contacts."

"Okay." There didn't seem to any point to saying anything; it wasn't a discussion.

~~Simurgh's Son~~

~~Simurgh's Son~~

Harry thought it a testament to the state of the country that even though the city's economy had largely collapsed and unemployment was at least 30% nationwide, a pharmaceutical company posted record profits and had a brand-new glass and steel sky-scraper in the middle of Brockton Bay's financial district.

He came by bus in a smart button-up plaid shirt and black slacks that still had their tags on when he dressed this morning, with a coat to ward off the lingering cold. The snow from February still clung to shadowy corners. While there was always the risk of a spring snowstorm, the long-term forecast was for an early spring. Global Warming from Endbringer attacks were cited as one reason.

When he reached the Medhall Corporation's headquarters, he saw two dozen other kids all dressed in nice slacks and long-sleeved shirts like himself. Many appeared to know each other and were talking quietly as they waited just outside the door.

While his reading informed him that only fifteen percent of Brockton Bay's population was black, it seemed odd that every single one of the kids in front of him was white, especially if this camp sent invitations to local schools. Harry's steps paused only for a second before he continued forward. They were white, and the majority looked blond, even if the color came from a bottle. He saw lots of blue eyes as well.

 _That explains the contacts._ "Hey," he said with false cheer as he reached the first kids. "This the place for the summer camp?"

A girl with honey-wheat colored hair and pale blue eyes turned to stare at him speculatively. She'd been talking to another girl with glasses, the left lens of which was blacked out and hidden by a fold of her brunette hair. The other kids seemed to defer to the first girl as she stepped forward in challenge. "Who're you, then?"

Harry shrugged. "Sean Reitger," he said, announcing his cover name. "My father transferred to Boston last week from Stuttengraff-Devon."

Harry had very little idea what it all meant, but evidently it was enough for the girl. "Nice to meet you," she declared. "Hanna Herren."

With her judgement declared, everyone else relaxed and Harry was accepted into their nice little Aryan clique.

Luke could have kicked all their asses, he thought. For that matter, so could Sophia.

His disdain faltered into awe as a six-foot tall blonde supermodel stepped out of the front doors.

"Good morning, my friends," she said in perfect English with just a taint of a German accent. "I am Jessica Biermann, program director with MedHall Corporation. We are so very happy to have you here with us. Please, come in."

The entrance of Medhall was a three story display in modern IKEA-chic. Maple-wood desks, slim metal chairs and benches dotted the smooth marble floors. Trees in rolling planters gave the otherwise austere white interior a bit of greenery. The fact that they were facing three balcony levels in a four-story tall open atrium just added to the visceral punch of the we-are-richer-than-you decadence that the whole building seemed to emanate.

"Before we can begin, we will go through security so that you can get your visitor badges. Does anyone have any questions?"

Harry could no more have prevented his hand shooting up than he could have prevented sunrise. "Yes, dear?" Biermann asked.

"Thank you. Will you marry me? I cook and give really good foot rubs."

Every kid there, including Hanna the Aryan and her One-Eyed friend, stared at him aghast. Biermann herself seemed momentarily nonplussed before she began laughing. "Oh, that is wonderful. I'm sorry, though, I don't think it would work between, dear."

"I understand," Harry said with a sad sigh. "Do you have a sister?"

She laughed harder. "I do. A twin, in fact. But I think your chances with her are even worse than mine."

Naturally, as they were speaking directly to each other, Harry heard the Simurgh sing of thundering, massive footsteps and the crash of giant swords on shields. He snapped a picture before bowing. "A boy can but dream. Thank you for having us today."

She nodded, still grinning, and proceeded to lead them to the tour.

"What was that about?" Hanna demanded.

"It was about the most stunning drop-dead gorgeous woman (who has a twin, by the way) I've ever seen," Harry sighed. He spoke just loud enough that he knew Biermann could hear. "There are some religions in the world that say if you die a good death, when you die, you get to see a woman like her. That would be heaven to me."

"You mean Valhalla," young One-Eye said.

"Bless you?" Harry hazarded.

Hanna snickered. "You're funny, Sean. Too bad you're in Boston."

He grinned at her. "Yeah, too bad. You're pretty cute yourself."

Her song sounded like a tuning fork, while One-Eye sounded like the sprinkling of a fountain. He snapped more pictures, wondering if everyone in the damn building was a cape.

~~Simurgh's Son~~

~~Simurgh's Son~~

"Eight," Coil said, for the second time. "You encountered eight parahumans in Medhall?"

Harry nodded. "Two were students in the group I was with, the rest were working for the company. For the record, if you need me to infiltrate the Biermann twins I volunteer without reservation."

"Fenja and Menja," Coil said, dismissing Harry's heroic offer. "E88 does have a great deal of power in the area." He was paging through the pictures which uploaded to his phone from Harry's fake glasses the moment he walked into the room. "The girl you were speaking to?"

"Her song sounded like a tuning fork."

"Ahhh, Rune, then."

 _Rune?_ Harry didn't ask, especially not with the Aryan vibes he got the whole time in the camp. The only non-whites in the building were janitorial staff and a few contracting vendors. Worse yet, those people seemed very much aware of who they worked for.

Where was Indiana Jones when you needed him?

"Well done, Mr. Bailey," Coil finally said.

Harry blinked, speechless. He'd never received a compliment before. "Er, thank you. Is that all you need?"

"Yes, you're dismissed."

With that, Harry left. He still wore the glasses, and as he walked toward the stairs he happened to catch his reflection with the glasses in the reflective steel of the industrial-sized refrigerator in the main atrium. He paused and stared at the reflection in surprise. He'd already removed the irritating contacts. But the glasses were still on with their plain lenses.

 _Wild, barely kept black hair, bright green eyes and black-rimmed glasses._ For the first time he could remember, Harry Bailey realized he could have been the very twin of the boy he saw in his dreams. He was taller-better fed and muscled with exercise and martial arts. But their faces were the same.

 _I look just like Harry Potter._

"Huh." He took the glasses off and continued on his way.

* * *

A/N: While the Medhall excursion isn't immediately important (it comes into play later), I liked it because it was a good demonstration of why Coil bought Harry in the first place.


	10. Genesis 9

A/N: Previous chapter review responses are in my forums as normal. Thanks for reading.

* * *

 **Genesis 1.9**

 _You speak great words, Staff-Breaker._

 _I dream great dreams, and wield great magic to make them so._

The hugely muscled man with the burly red beard spoke to the red-faced teen-ager with the heaving bosom and long honey-colored braids like a stage actor, his voice loud and strong.

The memory, while awesome, wasn't what Harry was another man's memory of a dream of someone else's memory. But it wasn't what he wanted. He concentrated, finding it easier and easier to do so within the memories since his startling conversation with Genesis before Spring Break.

" _You learned that from whom, Harry?"_

" _Rowena," Harry Potter said._

 _The ancient wizard with the braided beard that hung down to his navel nodded wisely. "Yes. Madame Ravenclaw was the first to successfully apparate, wasn't she? See, Amelia, he had the best of teachers."_

Ravenclaw. Harry concentrated on the name, and as he did so the memories shifted and changed. He shied away from some of them, of how the witch Ravenclaw suffered at the hands of the wizard Slytherin. He'd seen enough violence against women by Marko to never want to see it again. No, he concentrated harder, until he found the same memory that his namesake in all these impossible memories used. Harry Potter learned most of his first magic from his own ancestors through magically transmitted dreams. Somehow, those same dreams were included in whatever insane package Harry got from the Simurgh.

 _A tall woman with raven-colored hair and cold blue eyes stood in a meadow. She looked stunning, spots of red in the high planes of her otherwise pale cheeks. She wore fur breeches cinched by a rope at her waist, and a leather jerkin against her chest. The jerkin was open on the sides, exposing the skin of her ribs and the sides of her breasts. Behind her, on the edge of a vast lake of deep, dark blue water, stone towers grew brick-by-brick into the sky. It looked like a castle under construction._

 _In front of the woman were two large woven reed hoops, one at her feet, and one ten feet away. In her hands she held a clay tablet filled with detailed notes in a language Harry somehow knew to be Greek._

 _With a worried frown, she put the tablet down. "I can do this," she said. Again, it wasn't English she spoke. It was a guttural language, the language of the Northmen. This woman, he knew, was a Viking. She was a Viking witch of near unparalleled beauty._

Rowena Ravenclaw.

 _She stepped into the first hoop and closed her eyes. Harry could feel her mind moving through calculations as she directed her magic with a great, powerful will. She envisioned the other hoop with the type of clarity that came from sheer intelligence and pushed with her will and magic, not just wanting to be in the other hoop, but demanding it of herself and the universe around her._

 _The world squeezed her, like dough from a pastry bladder such as Salazar loved so much, and suddenly with a loud, clumsy pop she stood ten feet away in the other hoop. She stumbled and fell forward to her knees, but then began laughing hysterically. The laughter continued until tears welled in her eyes, but slowly shifted to something no longer so humorous._

" _Never again, you murderous snake," she whispered toward the growing castle. "You'll never touch me again. I swear it."_

~~Simurgh's Son~~

~~Simurgh's Son~~

Harry felt like he was in a holding pattern during school the next morning. It was hard to summon any interest in the lessons, or even in Sophia Hess's on-going campaign to torture Taylor Hebert into revealing her powers, or Taylor Hebert's ongoing campaign to suffer in silence.

He wanted Taylor to just beat the shit out of all three girls. He knew she wouldn't. Something in that girl was broken, and it caused near physical pain watching her suffer. As smart as she was, she just didn't seem to be able to understand that the only way to stop bullies was to stop accepting the role of target. Even if it got her beaten down or expelled, turning and beating the living shit out of Red or Cutesy would send a lesson, even if Sophia took her out in the process.

 _Easier said than done._ Despite himself, Harry's memories welled up with imagines of 'Harry hunting'. _Sometimes the least damaging role was passivity._

He shook his head and returned his attention to the count-down toward lunch. When Mr. G. finally dismissed World Issues, he was out the door only a second after Taylor, but while she ran up to the Third Floor girl's bathroom, Harry moved down to the first floor auditorium, which had an actual stage with stadium seating and great curtains that kept the stage separated. All school assemblies were done there, but also the drama classes.

He snuck in through the side entrance, bypassing the drama teacher's offices entirely, until he reached the far corner of the stage. He found some of the large, soft velvet ropes used to tie the curtains back and pulled one out enough to make a large circle in the shadows away from the teacher's office. With that done, he walked ten long paces back toward the office before facing the hoop.

The memory he recalled last night didn't just show him what Ravenclaw did. He felt her magic and recalled her thoughts as if they were his own. It was how Harry Potter learned from the Four Founders of his school.

It was how Harry Bailey was going to learn.

Having experienced through these odd memories what magic was supposed to feel like, Harry could now feel it in himself. It ebbed and flowed with every beat of his heart—a tingling feeling of power and _rightness_ that filled him like light. He grasped it, envisioning the coil of rope, and filled his determination with _magic._

With a loud pop, he stood inside the coil. "Holy fucking buggering pieces of bloody fucking shite!" The words spilled out of his mouth before he could control them, and he covered his mouth even as he danced a silly little jig, utterly overwhelmed with the results of his first, intentional mining of his memories.

He repeated the process twice, and then felt a burst of inspiration. He closed his eyes and envisioned the warehouse where they tested his runes. With a push of magic and determination, he popped into existence in the center of the abandoned warehouse, within sight of the boat graveyard.

"Okay, this is awesome," he whispered. "Things are going to be soooo different now."

Thinking about another spell he saw so often in his memories, he pointed his finger at a weed and shouted, " _Stupefy!"_

Nothing happened. " _Protego! Aguamenti! Abracadabra! Hocus Pocus!_ Just fucking work!"

He could _feel_ his magic, but the words did nothing. He sank down to the floor cross-legged and hung his head. "Why won't it work?"

"… _we have cores for your wands. We'll have to do a blood ritual to make them actually match you, but after that you girls can start learning magic proper."_

The snippet of memory whipped through his mind. It was one of Harry Potter's last memories from after the destruction of the Milky Way and the Continuum Wars. He'd been speaking to two of his new wives after obtaining dragon heartstrings for wands.

"Don't think Lung would appreciate me stealing his heart strings, whatever the fuck those are," Harry muttered. "I don't have a wand. How can I make one when there aren't any magical creatures? Harry Potter never seemed to need a wand."

Another snippet of memory unraveled before his eyes, as if he were there in living, breathing color. He was in a spaceship—a tunnel of scintillating blue hyperspace stretched out to infinity in front of him. Next to him was a breathtakingly beautiful woman with white hair, icy blue eyes and perfect, porcelain skin. Her face was perfectly symmetrical as she stared right back at him.

" _So what would being your wife entail_?" she asked, as if that were a perfectly ordinary question.

He heard himself answer—it could have been his own voice. " _You'd experience a significant power boost along with the training on how to use it. We'll need to find a focus of some kind, but if necessary you can learn to use the power without. Toward the end of their existence Magi did not need wands at all, and I know enough from those lives to teach you."_

"Duh," Harry muttered aloud. "I was trying to do wand magic without a wand. I need to stop thinking I'm a wizard. I'm not—can't be. I have to be a Mage instead." He glanced at his watch—lunch was almost over, and he didn't want to risk Coil hearing about him skipping. So with a sigh, he stood and apparated back to the drama department.

~~Simurgh's Son~~

~~Simurgh's Son~~

Words alone would not describe the freedom his new found skill presented him. Being able to teleport gave Harry a level of freedom he'd never had before. Since it often took two hours to get to or from school by bus, he wasn't expected back in The Coil Evil Lair of Doom™ until usually right before six. Apparation made that trip into a second.

That gave him two hours before, the lunch hour, and two hours after school every day to learn magic. _Magic._ And there was so much of it.

For all the wars and strife and violence that Harry Potter experienced over the eons of his existence, the vast majority of his memories were dominated by family and magic. The wars never lasted a lifetime, usually only a few years or decades at the most. On those occasions when he actually survived, Harry Potter chose to spend the rest of any given life having and raising kids, and either learning, or teaching, magic.

Memories played out across Harry Bailey's consciousness, of a particular life late in the evolutionary development of the Mage race. Potter wasn't reborn to fight any particular war—Mages had yet to clash with the Q or even assert themselves on a galactic scale yet. Rather, five scholarly women decided to petition the Council of Caldos to revive Harry Potter for a peaceful life spent in scholarship and personal research into history.

So, six hundred and eighty four thousand, nine hundred and forty eight linear years after Harry Potter was born, he was reborn into a galaxy as far removed from his origins as he was from _Homo heidelbergensis,_ the hominid ancestor that came _before_ the Neanderthals.

His wives were taller than he was, more slender of build with fewer overt dimorphic features. They had breasts, but their breasts were smaller than the women Harry grew up with. Their hips were narrower because Mage children were not born, but rather were magically removed from the womb when they were developed enough, assuming that a female Mage wanted to carry a child in her own womb at all. Most did since children gestated naturally tended to be stronger magically, but artificial gestation was perfectly accepted.

Harry Potter, the Forever Mage, found himself having to relearn magic again, since it had literally been a hundred thousand years since his last rebirth. The time scales were mind-boggling even to the immortal sorcerer himself.

The Mages of that last, peaceful life had left normal humanity behind. Humans had branched off into a myriad number of near-human species, but through a combination of wars and societal taboos, somehow the core stock of humanity had hardly evolved at all. Most humans in that period looked upon Mages with fear and distrust. Though Harry Potter couldn't have known it at the time, he was seeing the foundations for what would eventually lead the Mage race to forcibly conquer the galaxy—not because they wanted it, but to protect themselves _from it_. Which, unfortunately, was what brought them to the attention of the Q.

That was for another memory fugue, though. For now, Harry wanted to learn magic.

Harry Bailey learned post-Caldosian Magecraft right along with his name sake. He absorbed the lessons through a simple coin-sized device that attached to Potter's temple, inducing a penseive-like, wholly immersive experience in which he actually used the magic he intended to learn. The machine did not just teach—it implanted the knowledge and the experience to use that knowledge directly into Harry's mind. Mage children using this techno-magery never saw the inside of a classroom—by age ten they had learned more than most species could hope to learn in a lifetime, and continued to learn until they were in their forties.

Most Mages by then easily lived a thousand years. Harry Potter was still the most powerful in terms of brute magical strength, but against the elders of the Mage race even he felt somehow small and inexperienced.

When Bailey roused himself from his fugues, he tried what he had learned. Rather than cast a spell with a wand, Harry used his Occlumency to help him shape his magic into the desired outcome.

Red magic flared from the palm of his hand, flying unerringly to the point he desired. There was no reason to point a finger; he directed his magic with his will. "Fucking cool," he whispered.

On his third day of freedom, he stuffed the scruffy clothes he wore when he first arrived in America into his book bag. He suffered through a long interminable day just waiting for the bell to ring, and as soon as it did he made his way to the auditorium and, hidden by curtains, apparated to what he'd come to think of as his lair.

With his increasing power Harry decided he needed a costume. If Sundancer and everyone else had one, he needed one too. Unlike other capes, though, he didn't need to buy one or have it made. He could make it himself.

He laid out his rumpled slacks, pullover and hoodie he'd worn from the UK. While he knew he could just conjure something, transfiguration lasted longer. He also knew that for delicate or powerful work even many advanced Mages still used foci. Harry didn't have any of those tools, so instead he used touch.

He ran his hands down the length of the wrinkled old slacks, envisioning as clearly as he could what he wanted. When he was done, he did the same to his pullover and then the hoodie. He created beige slacks and white fold-over shirt in a _Gi-_ style, with a slightly darker dun-colored overcoat with twin tails that hung to the back of his knees and an attacked hood. Brown leather boots and a white brown leather belt cinched his waist. He transfigured one of Ballistic's spent ball-bearings into an oval white mask with eye-slits.

He didn't stop there, though. Using his finger, he traced a series of Mage runes into the newly fashioned mask, at first anchoring its shape, but then also adding more to it. It would feel and look transparent to his eyes and skin, but he could with a tap of a finger induce infrared and thermal vision as well.

In his borrowed memories, the uniform was that of a Jedi Temple guard that Potter had run across in a book during that last, eventful life before everything…ended. He didn't have any lightsabers, though he knew he had the memories to make them. However, it wasn't a lightsaber he wanted. His costume was a statement of who he was, and he felt it needed something else.

In the meantime, he spent at least an hour of his training time every day tracing runes into the costume to lock the transfiguration, and to connect the protections of his personal runes into the clothes themselves. He very much did not want to be naked again if he got burned.

~~Simurgh's Son~~

~~Simurgh's Son~~

"Jess, the paladin."

"Got it. Harry, some wrath of the gods would be nice."

"Consider them wroth."

On their monitors, the Forever Mage raised his magical staff with both hands and then brought it down in a dramatic gesture that unleased onto an approaching force of enemy paladins a storm of lightening, meteors and cats, a personal quirk that helped Harry's reputation in Craft of War, but made him very unpopular with PETA. The little digital cats meowed pitifully as they rained down amidst the destructive forces. Many of the felines clung to the paladin's faces, cruelly scratching out their eyes.

On the computer beside him, Marissa snorted. "Cats."

"Never underestimate the bizarre," Harry said wisely.

A knock at the door revealed Trickster. The man's costume was a formal tux, complete with a top hat and white gloves. He wore a comedic theater mask pained white on one side, and red on the other. His boots and the lapels of his coat were the same shade of red as his mask. Both girls looked up in surprise at his interruption.

"Got a job, boss wants to see us," he said briskly. "Bailey, boss wants you in your room."

With that, he turned and left. Marissa signed and signed off. "Asshole," she muttered. "Come on, Jess. Harry, sorry. Maybe I'll see you tonight?"

He smiled and leaned over to kiss her. "If not, I'll dream of you," he said. He waived at Jess, who was still snorting with laughter as his attempt at a romantic declaration, and then returned to his room. He'd barely even sat down when he saw he had a text on his flip-phone.

 _Taylor joined._

 _What made her decide?_

 _You didn't read the paper?_

 _Read, me? Other than the Sun Page 3 girl, never was interested in papers._

 _Taylor took on Lung and came pretty damned close to winning. She thought he was going to kill some kids. Didn't realize he meant the Undersiders. She let Armsmaster take credit, but it left open a perfect recruitment pitch. Money helped too._

 _How's she working out?_

 _Beat the shit out of Bitch. We're on our way to our first job._

 _Can you tell me about it?_

 _You'll know soon enough. Travelers are doing another, more sensitive job. Sundancer is going to be a wreck tonight. Thomas Calvert will be at PRT Headquarters._

He didn't like the sound of that. He knew Marissa and Jess both hated Krouse, and hated Coil, but something about their friend's illness was keeping them together against their will.

 _The cameras are going to be off on the Third Floor in half an hour._

Harry went very, very still as he stared down at the phone. _Do you know what I'm going to hear?_

 _I have a fear. I hope I'm wrong. Sometimes I am. I hope I am this time. But I have to know._

 _Okay. Half an hour. I'll be ready._

He started to stand up when he heard a click at his door. Frowning, he rushed over but the door handle wouldn't turn. He pushed up against it, but not only did it feel locked, it felt as if deadbolts had fallen into place above and below.

He looked back at the phone. A locked door might have been enough to stop him once, but not anymore. Really, it was just a matter of waiting half an hour. He moved back to his desk, opened a text book, and pretended to read. Finally, after half hour, he turned off his lights. It took a second to arrange his pillows like a body.

He cast only the second invisibility spell he'd tried and felt a tingling sensation over his body. Looking down, he couldn't see more than a blur where his feet were in the darkness of his room. When that was done, he closed his eyes and concentrated. With a push of will and magic, he found himself on the stairwell on the second floor. The stairs going down were unlit, with only the light from landing above to outline each step.

Still invisible, he began to slowly make his way down to the third level.

Despite all his training, he'd never risked a blind apparation before. Still, he knew his namesake had many times. It was a guess and a gamble. If he opened the door into the third level hall and soldiers were on guard, they would know he was there. But he'd never actually seen the hall so he couldn't know for sure just what was on the other side of the door.

He had to take the risk. He closed his eyes and envisioned the door in front of him, but from the other side. He pushed but did so slowly, so agonizingly slowly he could actually feel his body condensing into something that was not energy, but not physical either.

He appeared on the other side without a pop, having disapparated slowly enough not to displace the air too violently. However, doing so almost made him sick and it took a moment to swallow bile down.

The hall was wide, and to his shock he saw various huge steel door traps ready to snap shut every ten feet. In front of each door hung a large-caliber tinker-style gun mounted from the ceiling. They had blinking red lights, but didn't seem to detect him as he made his way forward.

Two guards stood just outside the last set of steel doors. One was playing on his phone. Harry had a freaking flip-phone, but even the lowly evil minions got smart phones?

Thinking about how to get past them without a nausea-inducing teleport, Harry searched his memories until he found what he was looking for. A silencing and scent-masking charm followed invisibility, and as non-existent as he could make himself seem, Harry headed toward the huge vault door at the very end of the hall.

Getting closer, he heard a girl's voice calling out.

"Francis, are you there? I'm hungry. Can someone please get me some meat?" The voice sounded young and uncertain. A moment later, it roared with tones that went far beyond mere human. "Someone get me some meat, damn it! I'm hungry!"

The whole vault door shook with an angry blow that made dust fall from the ceiling. The guard on the phone didn't look up. The other walked toward the vault right past Harry, where he flipped a switch. "Miss Meinhardt, we're so sorry to keep you waiting." He sounded calm and soothing. "Mr. Krouse has already left the base to get you something to eat. He should be back very soon."

"Thank you." It was the girl again. She sounded hopeful, but also despondent.

 _What the hell is going on? What was wrong with her?_

Harry drifted closer to the vault. There were no windows, but as he got closer and saw the switch the guard used, he also saw a video monitor. Moving closer, he got his first glimpse of Noelle Meinhardt, the secret of the Travelers.

He caught a glimpse of a worn, sallow face, and he recognized it from Jess's video chat he interrupted a week or so ago. She was gnawing a finger as tears rolled down her cheeks. "So hungry," she was saying to herself as she rocked back and forth. "So hungry. God, please kill me, why is this happening? So hungry." She spun around and Harry's stomach dropped as he saw the rest of Noelle Meinhardt.

The beautiful if despondent young woman ended in a Giger-esque mass of quivering flesh that didn't look even remotely human. He saw what looked like a horse's hoof next to part of a cow's muzzle sticking out of a huge column of flesh that might have been a leg. Other animal and even human body parts protruded from the back of those fleshy columns.

She spun around, eyes flashing, and roared, "I'm fucking hungry, Krouse!"

The Simurgh didn't sing his mind. It exulted; he heard a celestial chorus of diabolical joy using notes of burning buildings and screaming people on a scale he could scarcely comprehend. He'd never encountered anyone who elicited such a response from his song and before he could help it his stomach clenched painfully and he threw up.

"What the hell was that?" one of the guards said to the other. Both men started walking toward the vault.

Harry desperately vanished the mess he made and then visualized his room. He popped away, and a second later, in his room, he climbed into bed before removing his various stealth charms. Under the covers of his bed, he shivered violently and squeezed his eyes shut against the horror that was Noelle Meinhardt.

~~Simurgh's Son~~

~~Simurgh's Son~~

When Marissa stepped into his room, a glance at the clock showed it was almost one in the morning. She stepped beside his bed and he could hear heavy fabric and metal plates falling on the floor, followed by the heavy thump of her helmet.

"Can I stay here tonight?" She sounded as if she'd been crying. Harry just scooted over and lifted the sheet for her. She climbed in beside him, still clad in the shift and panties she wore under her uniform.

She took his arm and wrapped it around her until she clung to it between her breasts. A moment later he felt as much as heard her sob. He wanted to ask what was happening, but his own mind was still reeling so much he wasn't sure what he could say.

She spared him having to ask. "I hate this," she whispered. She suddenly let go of his arm and turned to face him, pressing against him as she buried her face in his neck. "I hate this. I just want to go home. I hate powers, and hate this fucking world. I just want to go home."

 _I hate this world._

Harry was in a conundrum. A beautiful, partially clad girlfriend was clinging to him in his bed. His body was responding on autopilot; but his mind knew this just wasn't the time. He struggled to control his thinking and his body just as his memories taught him.

He got a semblance of control over his raging hormones and simply held her while she wept. Finally, when she'd quieted down, he said: "Can you talk about it?"

"We kidnapped a little girl tonight." In the wake of her storm, she sounded emotionally dead. "She was crying for her mommy. Couldn't be more than 11 or 12. She's down in one of the third corridor rooms. She's a pre-cog, and Coil wanted her. Had the Undersiders hit a bank to distract the heroes, and then we just waltzed in and…and…" She sobbed again, but didn't start the shaking weeping this time.

"Trickster was making fun of her. He was talking back at her in baby voices, the shit. We're fucking gamers, Harry. We were a group of high school students on an MMO team when the Simurgh pulled us into this shithole. And now we're giving friends up to die and stealing little girls from their mothers. For what?"

There was nothing he could do, or say. So instead he just held her until she fell into a shallow, heart-broken sleep.

~~Simurgh's Son~~

~~Simurgh's Son~~

Marissa climbed out of his bed well before dawn, grabbed her costume, and slipped quietly out. When she was gone, he leaned over and opened his phone, waiting. He couldn't contact Tattletale, but somehow…

…she just knew. The bubble appeared at the top of his small phone screen. _You went._ _Tell me._

 _You first. Did you know about the girl?_

Tattletale was very fast on her phone, easily getting out five letters for every one of his. He lay in his bed waiting for a long time before her text bubble appeared. _Had an idea. Mayor's niece, thought it was a political move. That she'd cooperate because of some butthurt. Younger than I thought. Had powers. Pre-cog thinker, amazingly accurate percentages of any given event._

 _That's how old I was when Marko took me from my foster family. You knew._

Again he waited a long time for a thought bubble to appear. _Never pretended to be nice, Harry. I'm desperate. Couldn't have stopped it; tried to make it smooth as possible. Coil would kill family otherwise._

 _What's he going to do to her?_

 _You don't want to know._

 _NEED TO KNOW._ _Not want_ _._

Another painfully long pause. _Male nurse on staff. Ordered powerful, addictive drugs. Hooked in a week to ten days, dependent on drugs to function. Controlled._

Harry stared at the words, unable to articulate the various flavors of rage he was feeling. Rage—disappointment in Tattletale, Marissa and himself for even being in the same building as a kidnapped child.

For once the memories he had were not of another Harry in another universe. It was of a young Harry Bailey watching as the hulking form of Marko Slavitz used his dissolving power to melt the walls of his bedroom to allow a pair of his minions to rush in and begin trussing Harry up.

" _There's my little nightingale_ ," the huge, bearded man said with a thick, Russian accent. " _You're going to be singing lots for me boy. Or you'll end up floating down the Thames with your throat cut_!"

When a tear reached the corner of his mouth, he wiped it away in surprise. He tried, but couldn't remember the last time he'd cried from emotion. When Marko burned him, yeah. But just lying in the bed, thinking?

His thumbs began typing before he even realized it.

 _Noelle Meinhardt is an S-Class threat. Nilbog level or worse. The Simurgh song sounded excited by the death and destruction she's going to cause. Coil's going to use her, isn't he?_

 _Shit._

…

 _Shit shit shit. Yeah, I think so. Later this year. Coil said Armsmaster and Dragon developed software that predicts Endbringer attacks. There's a chance the northeast coast will be hit. If it's not Brockton Bay, he'll use Noelle I think. Tear down the city as a villain, rebuild it as Thomas Calvert, PRT hero of Ellisburg. Be a congressman. Be a president._

 _And you're okay with that?_

 _What do you want me to say? Coil recruited me at gunpoint. The money made it feel better, but there were still guns involved. He doesn't trust me, and he will kill us both if he even found out about this._

Harry knew Coil would have a harder time killing him than before, but he couldn't say he was still impervious. He still needed to breathe. The runes gave some protection to his face, but would that be enough to save him from a determined supervillain? He still wasn't super strong—what would keep Coil's men from just holding him down and shoving gun into his mouth to blow his brains out from the inside?

Would he send Marissa to kill him? Or Luke? Could he save anyone by himself?

 _Say I could get Dinah out. What would Coil do?_

 _Take her back with a higher body count. She's his high value target now. If you push, he'll find a way to kill you._

Wait. What? _What do you mean by 'find' a way?_

 _I saw the hole you made in the warehouse._

Harry tried not to swallow. She knew. Of course she knew, why wouldn't she. Still, did it matter any more? His thumbs began moving.

 _What if…we kill him first?_

…

…

 _He can create parallel universes at will, and chose the best one. Killing him would not be easy._

Huh. That explained a lot. _Say we can. What would you do?_

 _Fucking strip his accounts to the bone. He has seven-digit balances in accounts all around the country. He had no choice but to give me access. I've already skimmed a little, but I could empty them out fast."_

 _You're the Thinker. I've got options now. Give me a plan that reduces collateral damage but removes Coil. We get Dinah back home and split the profits._

 _We'll have to play the long game._

 _Play it any way you want, as long as Dinah gets home before she gets addicted._

The exchange went dormant, and seconds later all the text bubbles disappeared. Harry closed the phone up, plugged it in, and stared at the ceiling with a roiling feeling of self-disgust in his stomach. One floor below, he knew there was a terrified little girl he needed desperately to help.

* * *

A/N: While I know it's all AU now, the part I enjoyed most from HP and the Four Founders was my backstory for the founders themselves-Salazar as a Basque wizard who lost his family not to the Moors of Spain, but to the crusaders fighting them; of Hufflepuff and Ravenclaw being Viking witches captured in the final battle for Scotland's future before the first millennium, and of Godric's promise to them to create Hogwarts. That 'dream great dreams'...yeah, I liked that. So, another chapter down. I hope everyone has a happy holiday.


	11. Interlude: Executive Onboarding

A/N: Chap 10 review responses are in my forums as normal. And now, in keeping with the source material, I present an Interlude.

* * *

 **Interlude: Executive On-Boarding**

August 23, 2009*

Thomas Calvert watched his subject not by direct observation, but through the wireless video feed from the cameras he'd placed around the clothing store. He had similar cameras all around the boardwalk after one of his sources reported that Donald Stiggard's checking account was nearly emptied via an ATM.

Stiggard, a fellow PRT veteran and now a New Hampshire Superior Court judge, complained bitterly about how his play money was raided. Thomas, curious, did some digging on his own.

The digging turned into a full-scale excavation when he and his people discovered just how thorough the thief had been. He began to suspect a foreign government's involvement until a consulting Thinker 4 he'd worked with while in the PRT found a fork in the trail. He followed it aggressively until he found the missing person's report from William and Katherine Livsey, from San Bernardino, California. The picture they provided matched a face captured on a security camera at the ATM where a young girl managed to navigate the ATM's and bank's security so thoroughly she was able to empty his account.

Through a judicious use of his own power, Thomas found himself now sitting in the back of a chic clothing store, dressed as plainly as he could, watching a video feed on his phone as the very same girl stepped into the store.

Her story was plainly written across her face and her clothing. She was not quite fifteen, with the boyish figure of a girl still in her early teens. Her dirty blonde hair hung lank down past her shoulders, dyed blue at the tips. It gave no indication of having been washed lately, and the oily sheen across her cheeks and forehead glistened in the overhead lights of the store. Her clothes were wrinkled and filthy.

His sensitive nostrils could detect the rank smell of unwashed sweat from across the room.

"I think we've got a stray, Tasha."

The tall, attractive girl behind the counter spoke to the floor salesgirl, who though shorter, had a voluptuous figure. Both were under twenty, but still much older than the homeless girl who sauntered so brazenly into their high-end boutique.

Thomas watched, amused, as Tasha put her own phone away and moved to intercept the interloper into her small world of wealth and privilege. She made a point of clearing her throat to get the girl's attention before intercepting her. "Can I help you?"

"I'm good," Sarah Livsey said.

Thomas had to work to keep his features bland while fighting back a laugh. The sheer brazenness of the girl amused him, while it obviously irritated Tasha. Thomas quietly texted his intercept team to get ready.

"I'm going to be blunt, then," Tasha said. She didn't even try to be patient. "You can't afford these jackets. That one you just pushed aside? That's a design by Fendi. It's over four thousand dollars."

"No shit? It's ugly."

This time, Thomas did chuckle, but covered it by speaking nonsense into his phone. It wasn't just the girl's quip that tickled him, it was Tasha's response. She quickly looked around the store to make sure no one heard the expletive, as if the other people in the store didn't speak that way at all.

Thomas couldn't hear what the saleswoman said next, but he could read the hostility in her face and posture.

Little Sarah Livsey didn't appreciate it, whatever Tasha said. Because after a brief exchange Sarah's voice rose enough to be heard clearly through the store. "Shut the fuck up. Breathe in my face again and I'm gonna gag. Your breath smells like vomit and a halfhearted attempt at covering up the smell with candy."

 _There._ Sarah's tone changed. Rather than brazen and cocksure, now he heard anger and the absolute, taunting confidence of someone who knew a terrible secret. There was _power_ in that tone, a power that caused poor Tasha to raise a hand to her mouth, confirming Sarah's reading.

Little Sarah wasn't done yet, not by a mile. She let the jacket she'd been fondling drop as she reversed their roles and took a threatening step toward poor Tasha. "Your boyfriend is cheating on you, Tasha Fowler, sleeping with your best friend. Pretty fucking ironic, given how unattractive your friend is, and your continued attempts to puke yourself thin and make yourself pretty for him."

Each word was like a blow on the saleswoman, making her jerk and step back in alarm. Little Sarah continued her delivery with heartless, cold precision that Thomas could only admire. It was like an experienced _matador de toros_ dancing about the blundering, overmatched girl before delivering the final, killing blow.

"If you hurry and run the entire way, you can catch them in the act. But you can't waste a second."

And like the great matadors, having achieved undeniable victory, Little Sarah Livsey turned her back on her poor, broken opponent and started looking through jackets again. It was, in Thomas Calvert's opinion, a masterful performance. It also cemented his resolve to get that girl under his employ, one way or the other.

The girl was looking at him. In one universe, he met her gaze. Her eyes widened as recognition of what he was, if not who, sent her scrambling out of the store before Dennis could reach her. In another universe, he lifted the phone to his ear and started talking about a fictional girlfriend, though in a low tone appropriate for a public setting.

He allowed the universe where she fled to dissipate. She stood frozen, staring at him for a long moment, but he knew she didn't have sufficient data points to classify him as a potential threat. That could change if he varied his behavior in any way. She was new to her power—the timeline with the missing person report indicated two weeks at most.

In two weeks, she'd stolen almost ten thousand from various accounts. Still, she'd not bathed often or taken care of herself. She was an unsupervised teenager who suddenly had the world at her fingers, but no mother to tell her to take a bath and go to bed.

Her had no doubt she'd be dead in a month without someone to help her. _To control her._

He remained relaxed as he talked about his fictional girlfriend to no one. He did not intend to give her any clues about what was coming.

" _Coil, almost there."_

Dennis's voice hummed in his concealed earpiece. "Okay," he said aloud, as if responding to the aforementioned fictional girlfriend.

Through his extreme peripheral vision, he saw her studying him again. This time, he didn't see concern in her face, or curiosity. He saw greed. She'd marked him as a potential target.

 _Interesting._

The Universes split again. In one universe, she drifted closer, looking through various racks of clothes, until she managed to move by him and reach for a wallet. He grabbed her wrist with a practiced grip, only for her to desperately reach for his gun.

He had no choice but to hit her face to keep her from his weapon. She fell to the floor and started screaming. "Rapist! Help me, somebody help me!" It was a masterful performance, especially now that she had a black eye to support her story. He had no doubt with her power she'd have any law enforcement eating out of her hand.

In another universe, he crossed his legs and in so doing showed her just a hint of his .45. A second later she turned back and made a show of looking at something on a rack further away. She wasn't interested in confrontations she couldn't win, or in physical violence. This girl's weapons were words, not guns.

He allowed the first universe to dissipate just as Dennis arrived in his new universe. Little Sarah Livsey came to an abrupt stop as her power let her instantly classify Dennis as an immediate threat. Of course, that didn't take power. Thomas knew that the enforcers of the Brockton Bay Boardwalk often took liberties with the troublemakers they removed. The men were only a step above the criminals they policed, and often acted the part.

Somehow, though, he could tell from her body language that she knew this was no Enforcer. Dennis was, after all, a veteran PRT agent and a skilled mercenary. Sarah began scanning the room for an exit. An experienced girl in her place would have already known where all the exits were, but Little Sarah Livsey was not experienced.

Thomas stood up, still speaking to his fictional girlfriend, while his second mercenary, Jeannette, stepped out of the changing room. She made a show of talking cheerfully to Thomas about what she wanted to buy.

The girl muttered something to herself before bolting. In each of the possible universes, Dennis caught her. In one, Dennis back-handed her, causing a bad fall where she broke her arm and screamed in real pain. In another, Dennis struck her in the solar plexus and put her down without doing any permanent damage.

He allowed the first universe to dissipate.

"Oh my god, oh my god, what the fuck did she do?" The cashier was panicking in a most dramatic way. Thomas didn't bother hiding his sneer. He despised the predilection for cursing in the young. There was simply no reason for it.

Dennis played his part to perfection. "Phone the security office after I'm gone," he told the panicking girl. "My supervisor will take it out of my pay."

"Oh my god." Now the cashier was performing a part, noting that Dennis was actually a very attractive man, and she obviously hadn't had a date in weeks. Thomas didn't need Little Sarah Livsey's power to see that much.

From the floor, gasping for breath, Sarah tried to warn the girl about Dennis, but she couldn't catch her breath and gave up. It wouldn't have mattered anyway by that point. Thomas had engineered the narrative to this particular story, and it was too late to change it in the cashier's mind.

"I'll talk to her," Dennis continued. "Let's see."

Jeanette snorted; like Thomas she recognized that Dennis was playing his role up a little too much. The cashier was certainly buxom.

When he produced his own knife as if from Sarah's pockets, the cashier acted appropriately frightened, as if a little pocket knife was a real threat in Brockton Bay. Her concern over the knife and the way she leaned over to better show her cleavage was, in its own way, as masterful performance as what Sarah did early.

At least, it was effective for the intended audience. Little Sarah rolled her eyes like any disgusted teenager would.

Dennis must have caught Thomas and Jeannette's expression, because he instantly stopped playing hero for the girl with the large breasts. Instead, he grabbed Lisa around the back of her neck, pulled her up painfully, and marched her out of the store.

Thomas and his second mercenary followed a few steps behind. "Are you going to talk to her in person?" Jeannette asked. "Thought the plan was for me and Abin to handle it, and you talk by phone."

Thomas spun off the Universes and picked the one with the most desirable outcome. "Yes, I believe that's still the best course of action. You and Abin get her ready for the call, please. Still, I'm glad I came. She's fascinating creature, isn't she? All intellect with a delinquent child's morality."

This time, it was Jeannette's turn to roll her eyes.

Outside, the Boardwalk bustled with tourists and local shoppers. He noted with amusement how willfully the people chose not see the dirty, greasy-haired teenage girl being frog-marched along the boardwalk by the back of the neck by a large, armed man in uniform.

 _Sheep. Doomed sheep._

Dennis forced her into the prearranged side street, turning again quickly until they were behind the store. Thomas could hear a dull thud as she hit a back wall.

"Tell me what they're paying you, I'll double it. I won't have the money right away, but…"

There was no power in the words, just desperation. Thomas wondered if she'd overreached herself back in the store, or if she was just naturally scared.

Dennis gave her no reason not to feel fear.

"Not negotiating," he told her.

"What's next?"

"For now, we wait."

Thomas stood just around the corner from them, listening as Jeannette was joined by Abin, yet another of his men, who left him behind to get the girl ready. Through a small camera attached to the lapel of Jeannette's jacket, Thomas could see that Dennis had his hand between Sarah's shoulder blades, keeping her face to the wall.

"Marcus, you know that's no way to handle a lady," Jeannette said. She had a convincing BBC accent when she made the effort. She made the fake name up for Dennis on the spot. More seriously, but still with a fake accent, she said: "Turn her around."

Dennis did as requested, turning her shoulder until her back was to the wall. This time his hand rested on her collarbone, effectively pinning her against the wall. Abin stepped forward with a disposable flip phone, the kind you could buy with a pre-paid voice plan. "You have a phone call," Jeanette told her. "We advise you to take it."

The girl did so, not hesitating a second. "Sup?" she said, as if talking to one of her girlfriends back in California.

"I apologize for the manner of our meeting, I hope my soldiers were not too rough on you, Lisa Wilbourn," Thomas said. "Or is it Sarah Livsey?"

"Either-or," she replied. "Lisa these days."

So brazen. Thomas had a hard time not smiling in appreciation of the girl's arrogant braggadocio. "As you wish. I have been watching you for some time, Lisa Wilbourn, I have become aware that you are something special, and I would like to buy your services."

A pause as she listened to what her power had to say of the situation. Thomas knew she'd read her circumstance correctly when she next spoke.

"I'm listening."

~~Simurgh's Son~~

~~Simurgh's Son~~

September 3, 2010

Two men in oddly formal attire sat on a patio on the 13th floor of a building looking over the Boston Channel.

On the left, facing the channel, sat the villain Coil in pin-striped dove-gray stroller appropriate for a day-time luncheon. Double-breasted coat, trousers, silver necktie and waistcoat. He would look perfectly appropriate for a daytime wedding, save the featureless, eyeless domino mask he wore with it, a mask which allowed him to eat while hiding his face sufficiently.

Facing him, back to the channel but facing the entrance to the patio, sat the villain Accord. His ordinary full-face mask was replaced by a half-mask intricately fashioned from hand-carved teak wood and silver. The carving was so perfect and intricate each piece of the mask moved like the scale of a snake, following his musculature as perfectly as if it were his real skin. His tailored suit was charcoal gray, a Stresemann imported from Hamburg to his exacting specifications.

At the door stood Dmitri on the left, in full armor with his side-arm secured, and on the right a woman with a striking figure in a goldenrod yellow cocktail dress with her blonde hair secured in a flawless coif. Her studded mask was lined in an artful pattern with large citrines.

"As always, your hospitality is without peer, Accord. I thank you for having me."

Coil nodded and waived about the table. "And you as always are an excellent guest, Coil. It is my pleasure to host you. Now that we've enjoyed an adequate meal and drink, I wish to open by thanking you for your efforts with the Teeth. Your timely intercession with the Boston PRT was exactly the impetus I needed to distract Butcher from my operations."

"A pleasure. Adequate compensation for your guests, I trust?"

"Indeed. I have informed the Travelers that they would find a better welcome in Brockton Bay. Young Trickster makes an effort to behave more civilly, but I've had cause to discipline the less restrained members of his group. Still, I believe you will find their power set sufficient for your purposes, while their own inadequacies may be easily manipulated to your benefit."

"Indeed, I've already begun preparing for their unique circumstances," Coil said.

Rather than bringing up the next topic, Thomas merely sipped a particularly superb Merlot and waited for Accord to bring it up. There was no way he could broach the subject without sounding as if he questioned the other villain's means or abilities, and despite their mutual respect he had no doubt such a perceived slight would cost him. Perhaps it would even cost him Dmitri.

Accord recognized his silence for what it is, and instead of taking it as a slight, accepted it as an acknowledgment that Coil simply trusted in his ability. "I have given some thought to the burgeoning cape population in Brockton Bay. Your goal for Brockton Bay shares a certain symmetry with mine. Unlike Boston, however, your city is a virtual magnet for lesser villains. It would be quite the endeavor to destroy them all. Impossible without the active participation of the Protectorate. Almost impossible within the established rules of engagement."

Coil didn't wince, but he did make a point of sipping his wine and crossing his legs. "Interesting. Perhaps suspending such rules of engagement would change the circumstances?"

"It would. Such an action would bring both potential risks and gains. Your pet Thinker is already working on it, I take it?"

"Yes."

Accord pursed his lips in distaste. "Unruly child."

"Indeed, hence the reason I shall ensure she never disrupts our talks. She will be disposed of in time."

Accord nodded. "If you pursue that particular path, you will need more than intuition. Are you familiar with Justinian?"

Coil branched off a universe, in which he shot Accord through his mask while Dimitri instantly drove a knife in Citrine's throat. With the small, private apartment secure, he removed his phone and used his secure PRT file access until he found reference to Dominic Justinian, a Member of Parliament of the United Kingdom.

He collapsed that universe and smiled without teeth at the still patiently waiting Accord. "The only Justinian I know of is an MP in the United Kingdom."

"The same," Accord confirmed with a pleased nod, as if Thomas had passed yet another of his small tests. "He is an acquaintance of mine through some joint ventures in Greenland. He has an asset you might find of interest. Have you perchance heard of the Simurgh's Son?"

"I have."

"The boy is a blank spot to pre-cogs," Accord explained. "A lingering effect of the Simurgh's influence, I'm told. He's been vetted by both the Queen's Men and the Triumvirate directly as having no power—nor even the potential to trigger. And yet, Justinian assures me that he can detect capes."

Coil fought hard not to sit up. His reputation depended upon cool, calm consideration. "An interesting ability. I take it the authorities are ignorant of this fact?"

"Indeed. The boy was first captured by Marko Slavitz, but was then abducted by Colbert before being purchased by Justinian. Justinian mentioned the boy had ceased to be useful to him and he was considering just liquidating the asset. However, it made me think of your situation and your goals."

"I appreciate your sharing the information," Coil said, tallying how much would be appropriate payment. "I do believe that would help me alter the current rules of engagement. Did Justinian by any chance mention a cost for this boy?"

"A paltry sum, $50,000."

Paltry indeed—Accord spent more than that just for this lunch. "Paltry indeed. The information you brought of the boy is worth many times that. In terms of executive searches, I believe a contingency fee to yourself would be appropriate."

"Agreed."

"I'll have it to you before the end of the day," Coil said. "As I've always found to be the case, our meeting has been fruitful even beyond my original goals. I thank you for your excellent hospitality."

"A pleasure, as always," Accord said. Both men stood simultaneously—neither offered a hand to the other. "Until next time."

"Until then." Accord nodded in farewell and then, after a second to ensure Accord's permission, turned to leave. He was on the phone securing his newest asset before the elevator even reached the ground floor.

~~Simurgh's Son~~

~~Simurgh's Son~~

April 15, 2011

Marissa Newland climbed into her car in the student parking lot of Arcadia High and simply stared out the window. Outside, the rest of the student body was disbursing quickly through the rain that had fallen most of the day, running toward their own cars. There were almost twice as many student vehicles as there were staff and faculty cars, and quite often the student vehicles were newer and far more expensive.

"So, how'd your SATs go?"

Marissa screeched and spun around in her seat to see a cape in her back seat. This cape wore lavender, with a domino mask and an eye sewn onto the chest of her costume. "Who the fuck are…?"

"Name's Tattletale," the cape said, interrupting her. "I'm another one of Coil's slaves. You should know all about Coil's slaves, right 'Mars'?"

"Only my friends call me that."

"Harry doesn't. So he's not a friend?"

"That's none of your business. Get the fuck out of my car."

"Can't do that. Least not yet. See, I have a problem."

"I don't care."

"You should, honey, you're part of it. You see, Coil is going to kill me. And Harry. And you. And Jess. Pretty much everyone but Krouse. Maybe Luke if he sells his soul. Know how? He's going to let Noelle loose. Thousands, tens of thousands, will die. And it will be your fault."

Marissa gripped the steering wheel with both hands and tried to control her breathing. "You lying bitch," she hissed. "I'm going to fucking burn you into goo."

"You won't have to," Tattletale said. "I'll already be dead. You think you owe Trickster. You think you owe it to Noelle. Trickster's convinced you Coil's the only way for you to get home and fix her. Guess what—I handle Coil's finances. He hasn't spent a penny researching how to help your friend, and he knows people who could get you home this afternoon, but he's never contacted them. Know why? Because there is no help. If anyone had a cure for monstrous powers, they would have cured Nilbog, Ashbeast or Sleeper by now. There is no cure for Noelle. There never was, there never will be. She was dead the moment Trickster gave that power—the moment Trickster made her a monster."

The interior of the car began getting hot as Marissa turned around and glared. "How can you know that? No one knows that!"

"I'm psychic," Tattletale said with a fox-like grin. "Who are you, Marissa? Are you Sundancer, the kidnapping, murdering villain? Are you Marissa Newland, the over-wrought daughter of a driven stage-mom? Or are you Mars, a friend who loves Noelle enough to free her from the hell she's living right now?"

"Shut up!" The windows fogged up from the heat inside the little car.

"Has anyone ever asked Noelle what she wants? You hear from Trickster what you're supposed to do for her. What you have to do for her. But have you or Jess ever asked Noelle what she wants you to do for her? Do you even care?"

"GET OUT!" Something in the car popped—the alternator, fried by a sudden flash of electromagnetic energy.

By the time she managed to calm down, Tattletale was gone and she was stuck in a dead car.

She turned and slammed both fists into her steering wheel. "FUCK!"

* * *

*Large portions of Tattletale's recruitment are from Interlude 8 (Bonus) of Worm by Wildbow. The original scene was written from various characters POV's and was an illustration of how Tattletale's powers work. I rewrote the scene solely from Coil's perspective to become an illustration of how his powers essentially trumped hers, but nonetheless the dialogue and action is directly attributable to Wildbow.


	12. Metamorphosis 1

A/N: Chap 11 review responses are in my forums as normal. Thanks for reading.

* * *

 **Metamorphosis 2.1**

Harry was surprised to see an unusually cheery Taylor Hebert in Mr. G's class on Friday morning. When he came in, he found her sitting straight at her desk with her shoulders back, head high, and with the merest hint of a smile.

She even greeted him with a grunted, "Morning", which was more than he usually got. He knew she still suspected he was in collusion with Hess, but he'd made a point not to make things worse for her, and she was in a good enough mood to acknowledge the fact.

It didn't keep her from fleeing Mr. G's class when the bell rang, but Harry was just amazed she'd shown up at all. According to the news he'd read that morning, the Undersiders robbed a bank. According to Tattletale, Hebert was a member of the Undersides. Which mean he'd spent the class next to a successful teen-age bank robber.

The afternoon dragged on for an eternity or more. He could almost feel the arm of the galaxy itself spinning about him as Mr. Cockerfield droned on about some American poet who wasn't worth the name. Finally, though, class ended and Harry went to the stall on the second floor bathroom that had become his departure point since the drama class had begun after-school rehearsals for their upcoming spring play. With an assertion of will and magic, he disappeared.

Seconds later he appeared in what he now considered his lair.

The warehouse where he and his friends tested his runes made a perfect place to test other things as well. Warding the structure was the first of many exercises he engaged in. He drew upon early warding memories because he didn't want to risk accidently blowing the place up if he tried a Post-Caldosian warding scheme and made a mistake.

Caldos. The idea of a colony of witches and wizards on an alien planet seemed so far-fetched as to be laughable, but the existence of that world dominated the majority of Harry Potter's plethora of memories. More than Earth, Potter considered Caldos his home. The migration of the magical population from Earth to Caldos also marked the first transition from witches and wizards to Mages. Magic ceased being mystical and became a subject of scientific inquiry on the part of the best minds alive at the end of the 24th Century and beyond.

In Harry Bailey's mind, just as in the memories of his namesake, he drew a sharp distinction between the magic before Caldos, and the power after. Magecraft began to advance exponentially just like technology did after being freed from the confines and biases of Earth, often times pairing with the technologies of the day to create amazing, new applications of their power Albus Dumbledore could never have imagined.

Harry Bailey had the memories of the _whens_ , _whys_ and _whats_ , but he didn't have the education or intellect to understand the _hows_. Harry Potter understood the theory of his power, but only after lifetimes of intense study. He learned something new every lifetime, building on the previous life's foundations until he could claim to be the most knowledgeable Mage to ever live.

Bailey had those memories, but he didn't yet _possess_ the knowledge or wisdom of why and how things worked. So, naturally, he was very cautious regarding what he did and didn't do. Even Harry Potter in the later stages of his life occasionally made mistakes in his more advanced warding schemes, and always made sure where possible to have someone look over his work. If an ancient immortal wizard wanted his work double-checked, then Harry himself wasn't quite willing to take the risk that his sixteen-year-old mind could do such work without guidance.

Instead, he cast simple muggle-repelling wards and do-no-harm wards. He cast the plotting ward to make the property unplottable. He really wanted electricity and cable, but Potter's memories did not contain any information on how to steal cable, internet, or the electricity to make it work. At least not as such existed in the early 21st Century.

So, Harry had a large, empty warehouse that was unplottable and unnoticeable to anyone without magic. He furnished it with a _reparo'd_ a sofa and a coffee table he'd recovered from a nearby refuse pile, an old refrigerator he charmed to be ever-cold (a charm which despite the name he had to recharge every three to four days) and a cracked mannequin that held his now charmed and permanently transfigured costume, which he'd yet to wear outside of the warehouse.

None of that was what made him excited that Friday, though. No, he'd finally decided what he needed as the final stage of his costume. He found the inspiration for the idea in his avatar in Craft of War.

He was making himself a magical staff.

The knowledge he drew on was not a memory of Harry Potter doing anything, or even Magecraft from Caldos, but rather a memory of something Harry once read about the wizard Merlin's staff. The original staffs of European wizards and witches did not have a magical core. In fact, Merlin himself was largely famous for being among the first to craft a modern staff, which led to Godric Gryffindor creating wands using similar techniques.

Merlin's first staff, though, was made of alder wood with inlaid silver runes to conduct his magic. It held no magical core.

The ten sheets of fine silver arrived by overnight delivery from a jewelry supply store in Santa Fe and waited for him outside the warehouse, just beyond the wards. Fortunately no one came by to find the ten 6" x 12" sheets of pure silver in the shipping envelope.

The alder wood Harry actually found on Captain's Hill, in a small park in the wealthy neighborhood. He found four or five branches, each easily two inches thick, five feet long, and damned-near perfectly straight. He'd already ruined two while trying to magically trace the runes necessary for what he wanted. His third attempt so far was perfect.

What excited him most about the idea of his staff wasn't so much having a focus—he was learning how to cast magic without a wand after all. No, what excited him was both the magnifying effects on his magic the staff would have, and the flying charms. In the era before Rowena Ravenclaw developed apparation, and centuries before the Floo network, wizards used their staffs like brooms, since there was a certain gender stereotyping involved with witches and brooms that didn't go away until the development of Quidditch.

Harry was going to fly!

He grabbed a can of soda from his charmed icebox, put the latest staff attempt on the work table, and pulled out the sheets of fine silver. So far, he'd magically burned all the runes onto this branch to a depth of one sixteenth of an inch, and checked them over and over again from his memories.

The relatively low price of the silver surprised Harry. Silver for jewelry manufacture was not that expensive in its bulk state. He had money—his request for money to pay Jess for his tattoos led Coil to actually give him a portion of his salary as cash. So, he could replace the silver if he screwed up the application.

He hoped he wouldn't have to, though.

The soldering spell he used was ancient—the word for it predated Latin because Roman wizards used it as well, as did the Greeks and Mycenaeans and Carthaginians and every other metal-shaping culture of the Mediterranean. Nor did it require a wand, just a finger and lots of concentration.

" _Fie!"_ A tiny section of the silver abruptly melted into the rune shape below, no more than a sixteenth of an inch deep, and an eighth of an inch in length. Harry lifted the sheet away from the wood and ran a finger of the well-sanded wood surface and the silver inlay. The level was so perfect he could barely perceive the transition of wood to silver. The silver was still warm to the touch but had hardened almost the moment Harry released the magic.

"Bloody 'ell," he whispered. "It's perfect!"

No wonder ancient smiths of Potter's world were almost all magical.

He put the silver sheet back on the staff and ran his finger along its entire length, pronouncing the incantation once but maintaining the magic until he reached the end of that row of the sheet. Before his eyes, the edges of the silver sheet melted into the waiting runes perfectly, one after the other, until a whole foot of one section of the staff was perfectly inlaid with silver. He repeated it for the next foot, and the next, and the next, until the entire five-foot length of that one side of runes was inlaid.

The next hour passed in a haze of concentration and magic as he continued lacing the staff with the most magically conductive metal he could find outside of mithryl. He went through two entire sheets of the silver, since each row of runes only took up a portion of the staff's circumference. Finally, though, he finished the final row and stepped back, stretching and blinking his tired eyes.

The staff was a thing of beauty, glistening with the silver runes under his witch light. It wasn't done yet, though. The last step of crafting an ancient-style staff was the primary reason it went out of style so quickly when Merlin developed the more modern methodology of magical cores. It was easier to sacrifice an animal for a part than one's own blood.

Harry took a bottle of hand-sanitizer and rubbed it in thoroughly before using a weak slicing spell to cut both of his palms horizontally, from just above his thumb to the blade of his hand opposite. He hissed at the pain, but then followed up with the anti-coagulating spell. He had to bleed, and it _had_ to hurt. It wasn't just about charging and binding the staff to his magic, it was about sacrificing a part of himself to do so.

With both hands, he gripped the very top of the staff and began vigorously rolling it between his cut and bleeding palms, making sure to impregnate every square inch of the staff with his blood. He didn't bother hiding his hiss of pain the process caused because there was no one there to judge him for it. He lifted it up in the air as he worked, making sure that no contaminants made its way into his sacrifice. It grew harder keeping the staff balanced as he reached the thicker base, but he finally managed to coat the entire staff in his blood.

Still gripping the butt of the staff, he pronounced the same charm Merlin used as a youth. " _Cheangal Riumsa!"_

The blood on the staff exploded in flame. Harry stumbled back, palms still spraying blood, as the staff floated in the air and burned like a flaming sword from a movie. The flame vacillated between white, red, blue and green before abruptly it vanished.

The staff fell to the ground with a loud _clack._

Stunned, Harry attended to his hands and made sure to vanish any of his blood he could find before he stepped to the staff. He started to reach for it when it shot from the floor into his freshly healed palm. The wood felt warm and comfortable, almost like how Marissa felt when they snuggled in bed together. It was a _sensual_ feeling.

Under the glaring white of his witch light, he stared at the lacquered surface. His blood didn't just bind the staff to his magic, it encased the wood and runes in his power almost like a strong lacquer that gave the wood and silver a dark red, shiny gleam. It would take a huge act of magic or a ridiculous amount of physical power to break this staff, Harry knew.

On a whim he pointed the staff at one of the torn walls of the warehouse and mentally incanted the ancient, pre-Caldosian _Reparo_ charm.

Magic flashed out of the staff in a blur. The rent hole in the metal wall abruptly disappeared as the metal knit back together. The magic didn't stop there, though, spreading beyond that one hall to repair a nearby broke window and reinforce one the third girders that framed the skeleton of the building itself. It felt like the gushing water of his magic was compressed by a nozzle. The magic itself didn't increase, just the pressure of its application. A wand could have done the same thing even more efficiently, but for now the staff provided everything Harry could want. It opened up the older spells as well as the advanced, wandless magic in a way he hadn't realized he'd miss.

"I love magic," Harry whispered, eyes wide.

He looked at his new staff, then at the ceiling high above. Potter's many adventures on a broomstick were some of Harry's favorite borrowed memories, and it felt perfectly natural to mount the staff. His intent shaped the staff's magic and he could almost immediately feel the air between his legs balloon out into a comfortable seat as rune-shaped cushioning charms activated.

Grabbing the staff with both hands, Harry _willed_ the staff up and didn't even bother stifling a loud _whoop_ when the staff lifted him easily into the air. "God, this is amazing!" He shouted with joy as he let the magic flow, and the staff shot him forward as fast as any broomstick.

His costume was complete…and it was six. "Shit!"

He landed and leaned his new staff against the mannequin that contained his costume and stared at it longingly for a moment. It would be so easy to…

The revelation left him stunned. _He could leave Coil_. He had power now, possibly enough power to protect himself from Coil's machinations. He was a cape in everything that mattered, even if he didn't have an actual cape power. He could join the Wards and…

Coil would find out it was him and hunt him down. Dinah Alcott would continue to suffer, and Noelle would still be a threat to the whole city. "I wonder if this is what Lisa goes through," he said aloud. If anyone could have figured out a way to escape and still save everyone, it would be Lisa.

He checked his watch again and winced. Five after. Coil didn't bother talking to him every day, but he also did not like it when any of his employees weren't where they were supposed to be when they were supposed to be there.

He apparated to a public bathroom in a gas station two blocks down from Coil's base and then ran as if his life depended on it.

"Cutting it close, Bailey." It was Dimitri who met him at the doors to the lift when Harry stumbled in.

"Had to make up a test," Harry lied easily. "Missed the first bus. Too late to catch dinner?"

"No, go eat," Dimitri said easily enough.

After a good meal of chowder, Harry made his way to his room. He found himself thinking back to his costume and staff, almost itching with the need to give it a try. Instead, he broke out his books to finish up his homework for the day. It rankled that he was a slave to a supervillain who actually required him to maintain his grades for public appearances.

After, he wondered over to Jess's room, thinking he might log on and get some magic action online. He found Jess in her room on a computer, but not playing. "Hey," he said by way of greeting. "Where's Marissa?"

"She wasn't feeling good, so she's laying down," Jess said. "I think she's just making herself a nervous wreck over her SATs, that's just how she is. Maybe we'll see her later."

"Yeah, maybe. Thanks, Jess."

There were some unspoken rules in the relationship Harry had with Marissa. The first was that her room was _her_ room. Jess's room was neutral ground. He'd never seen the inside of Marissa's room and she never gave him any indication she wanted him to. If she retreated to her room, she was essentially out of his reach. He knew there was an intrinsic inequality in the relationship he had with Marissa, but he accepted it gladly for sex. After all…sex. What almost seventeen-year-old boy wouldn't want sex, even if there were some pretty heavy strings attached?

He went back to his room and sat upright in his bed, drifting into memory. He purposely narrowed the memories to the advanced post-Caldosian ward schemes. If he was ever going to escape Coil, he wanted a lair as safe as magically possible. Warding was dangerous enough that he _had_ to understand it to ever hope to use it well.

Within his memories, he had no way to know how much time passed. He guessed it was fairly late though when his phone's buzzing woke him. He blinked himself out of his fugue and reached for the phone.

A single text bubble appeared: _Need help now. Trainyard. –TT_

The whole building shook and the lights flickered overhead. Harry wasn't even out of his bed before he heard the door latch click, followed a second later by the deeper metallic _thunk_ of the door frame being secured.

A speaker in the upper right corner of his room beeped. "Attention, the ABB Tinker Bakuda has begun a bombing campaign across Brockton Bay." It was Dmitri speaking, not Coil. "The campaign does not directly impact operations. Base is on lockdown until further notice."

Harry had no idea who Bakuda was, but if Tattletale was in trouble it was probably related. He glanced at his phone, but the text was still there. She hadn't had a chance to delete it. Harry deleted it manually on his side, closed his phone and left it on his nightstand. He made a show of turning off his lights and going to bed.

A split second after he made it look like he was sleeping, he apparated to his warehouse with a thought. The moment he landed, he felt the ground shake with the force of a nearby explosion that lit up the interior through several of the busted windows. Whatever bombs this Bakuda was using were powerful.

"Time for Mage's introduction," Harry said to himself, caught between excitement and fear.

He started stripping out of his clothes before blinking. "Oh, right. Magic."

He performed a switching spell, and just like that he was in costume. After all, that was why he used the mannequin in the first place. He slipped his charmed mask on and took a deep breath. With the charms in place, it didn't feel like he had a mask on at all. He slipped on his hood and reached for his staff.

The magical focus was so attuned to his magic it flew to his palm with a loud, satisfying _thud._ Then he simply stood there, fully costumed for the first time, staring at the door while outside he could hear another loud explosion, this one close enough to light the windows.

"I can do this," he whispered. He closed his eyes and tried to remember examples of Potter's bravery. The memory of Potter's first death came to mind, walking slowly to his death to save someone he loved.

"Fuck that shit," he muttered. "How bout I just beat the enemy instead?"

With the strategy of martyrdom firmly rejected, he ran toward the door of his warehouse and flung it open to reveal the humid, cool evening air.

"Point me Tattletale." An arrow of dim purple light pointed west toward the large train yard storage area, where containers were once offloaded from shipping vessels to await transport by train around the country. Business had dwindled in the past few years, but still clung tenaciously to life. Still, most of the containers and lockers hadn't been moved since Leviathan decimated the international shipping industry.

He mounted his staff and launched into the air with a nearly involuntary _whoop_! With his charmed mask, he could still feel the air against his skin even as insects and other debris bounced away, giving him all the joy and none of the flies in his teeth that his namesake used to suffer from as a youth.

After only a minute of flying he found almost an entire army of people in every mode of dress, from pajamas to work clothes, surrounding the various locked containers throughout the storage area of the train yard. Some carried bats or sticks, others carried guns. He noticed that those with the firearms often sported ABB tattoos, while those with the bats and cudgels looked like terrified civilians.

It took him a moment to actually see Lisa, though. He hadn't realized that it was harder to tell individuals apart from so high up. Flying lower, though, he saw an overturned jeep with a ring of bodies around what looked like a crater in the middle of the cracked asphalt surface. He spotted a figure leaning weakly against one of the locked containers that he assumed was Grue, the leader of the Undersiders, just from the black leather and muscular build.

Though she'd hate it, he spotted Lisa in her lavender costume just by her figure. A figure like hers was something he remembered. Beside her, a foot or two away, laid a skinny boy in a pirate's shirt and tight leather pants. Both looked passed out, as if they'd bounced off each other before collapsing.

Across the crater, opposite the two lay a figure in a dark gray costume he could barely make out. She lay prone on her stomach, unmoving. At least, he assumed it was a her from the long, curly brunette hair.

In the center of them all stood a figure in the most ridiculous costume Harry had ever seen. The woman—and he could tell her gender even from his height—wore a skin-tight leotard with a broad belt cinched around her waist, skintight white sleeves and leggings. Actual leggings. She wore an elastic hood that clung to the black gasmask she wore, though the lenses were bright red. Heavily laden bandoliers filled with cylinders crossed her chest. Most disconcerting were the electric pink boots she wore.

In the back of his head, the Simurgh's song for her sounded like the finale of the 1812 Overture as performed by Megadeth and accompanied by the 7th Panzer Division. Rage and explosions and arrogance.

Even as he watched, she used one of those boots to kick the darkly clad brunette cape in the face. Harry had a feeling it was Taylor she was kicking and started to drop down, trying to formulate a plan. The villain left Taylor, stepped over and leaned down to Grue's face. He couldn't see what she was doing, but she saw Grue's legs kick briefly with pain.

Urgency overtook caution. Harry had to act _now._ He gripped his staff and readied his magic. With a thought, he suddenly stood on the ground right in front of Lisa.

The villain was busy monologing to Taylor and didn't even notice him. Though she apparently had an army of people in the area, none were there at that moment to tell her of the intrusion.

"…purely by accident, I cracked the Manton effect. Or at least, whatever I'd done when I put the grenade together, it bypassed the Manton effect. You idiots know what that is?"

With a wave of his staff, Harry summoned the prone Taylor. She flew past the startled villain, flailing with an alarmingly large knife that suddenly appeared in her hand. Harry caught her and winced when she tried to stab him, either unaware of what happened to her or that he wasn't an enemy. His runic protection and the charms on his costume prevented any harm, but it had been a strong blow. He saw blood obscuring one of her lenses and the moment he let go she tumbled boneless to the ground almost on top of Lisa, seriously hurt.

"Who the fuck are you?" the villain screamed in a synthesized but still patently female voice.

"Call me Mage." Harry waved his staff and unleashed a simple, low-powered blasting curse. In his memories, curses like what he used sent witches and wizards flying backwards, stunned, but didn't kill. He wanted to blow Bakuda back off her feet and knock her out before she could do anything else.

It was his first heroic act as a cape. It did not go anywhere near according to plan.

His eagerness to save his friends, coupled with insufficient information on the situation, resulted in a disaster. Bakuda screamed incoherently a second before she disappeared in a white-hot flash of something he could only call super-heated plasma. His curse somehow ignited one of the bombs on her bandolier. Harry had a split second to summon a shield through his staff around himself and those immediately behind him before the wave of white-hot energy washed over him and everything around him.

Over the intense hum-buzz of this impossible explosion, he heard hundreds of small _cracks_ echoing all around him, accompanied by screams of terror.

Abruptly it was all over. Harry knelt down against the asphalt, exhausted from the sheer amount of magic it took to shield against the explosion. In front of him he saw a steaming, perfectly spherical depression in the cement interrupted only by a smaller protruding hemisphere caused by his shield—all the containers, the overturned jeep and all the people within the vicinity of the crater were simply gone.

In the far distance he could see lumps on the cement, or in some cases smears, from what looked like other explosions. "Holy shit," he whispered.

"Harry, you idiot," Tattletale whispered weakly from the ground behind him. "Deadman switch. Bomb tinker."

He turned to look at her but then froze, eyes widened and stomach revolting. "Oh God," he whispered.

His shield didn't cover all of Regent. The white Pirates of Penzance shirt the teen wore was immaculate down to the navel; below that was blood and a seeping pile of…

Harry barely managed to get his mask off and spin away from Taylor and Lisa before he was violently sick. He continued to puke until only bile came up. Turning, he looked toward where he last saw Grue. There wasn't any sign of him at all, just the edge of the blast radius of the explosion that ate partially into the container Grue had leaned against.

"What did I do?" he gasped. "Holy shit, what did I do?"

"Guilt later," Lisa gasped, obviously badly hurt herself. "Get us out of here. PRT is coming!"

It took an act of will to pull his mask back on and kneel down beside the still unconscious Taylor and Lisa. "I have no idea how this will feel to you," he admitted. "I'm sorry."

He grabbed their arms, and just as the sound of sirens came into hearing range, he _willed_ all three of them away.

* * *

A/N: And so the fit hits the shan. I've mentioned on many, many occasions in my forums that I am a fan of the Jungian archetypal "Hero's Journey" model of story telling in my HP fics. The three general arcs of this monomyth are the 1) Departure 2) Initiation and 3) Return. Always there is an event or circumstance which forces the hero to leave his or her existing circumstances to begin an adventure which will test and strengthen, so that when they return they do so as heroes that can improve their world. The first 10 chapters of Arch 1 established the originating circumstance. With this first chapter of Arc 2, they are called to adventure. And no, it won't be all sunshine and puppies. For them to reach their fullest potential, they must be tested sorely.

Thanks for reading.


	13. Metamorphosis 2

A/N: Chap 12 review responses are in my forums as normal. And now...

 **WARNING**

So, every story I get people whining about how horribly grimdark my stories are. Which is utterly ridiculous because they really aren't. That said...well, the first part of this chapter really is. This is a very hard chapter. Necessary, yes, but hard. It was hard to write, and may be hard to read for the first half. If you are sensitive, you may wish to skip the first scene entirely.

* * *

 **Metamorphosis 2.2**

Among her many skills and talents, Jess was a rather proficient hacker.

She'd hacked both of Coil's servers within the day they arrived from Boston as part of a formal agreement between Accord, their previous boss, and Coil, their new one.

Coil kept all base security on one server; and all communications and information services on the other. The wi-fi all the mercs used routed through his CI server. Jess's game ran through his security server.

Her communications with Mars, Luke and Oliver, however, ran through a weak, highly encrypted router she'd brought with them from Boston. The signal strength wasn't enough to get past their floor, but within that the Travelers could message or email without fear of Coil monitoring everything they said.

 _I want to see Harry._

The private message was unusual because of its urgency. Jess knew, like Marissa herself, that Harry was a fling and nothing more. Marissa didn't love the boy. The love of her life died when the Simurgh pulled them all out of Earth Aleph and into this hellish world of capes and monsters. He was means of relief and nothing more.

Jess felt a little sorry for the kid; she knew he was developing feelings that Marissa would never be able to reciprocate.

That said, the PM she'd just received over their secure router hinted at a sense of unusual urgency. Given that Mars had remained locked in her room since she got back from school made Jess wonder if her friend had tanked her SATs.

 _Door's unlocked._

She could hear Mars' door open from next door. Trickster and Ballistic were both downstairs, ostensibly standing guard in case this Bakuda person attacked them. Sundancer's power was so dangerous Coil tended to save her as a weapon of last resort, while Jess's power could be summoned from wherever she was.

A few seconds later, Jess looked up when Mars stepped in, frowning. The other girl's eyes and nose were red; she'd been crying. "Harry's not there."

Jess raised a brow but just shrugged. Harry wasn't her problem. "So, what's wrong?"

Mars sat down on Jess's bed. "Just…been thinking."

"About?"

"Us. What we do. Why we do it."

Jess didn't say anything—she'd been having those thoughts since they arrived in this screwed up world.

"Jess, if it were possible to cure haywire powers at all, wouldn't they have tried to cure Nilbog? Or Ashbeast?"

 _Oh shit._ Jess kept her face perfectly neutral. "Maybe. They'd have to get close enough to either of them to actually administer the cure, though, and I don't think those monsters would cooperate."

"What about all the Case 53's?" Mars asked. "Look at that poor man in Faultline's crew—the Snail. If there's a way to cure any of this, why haven't they found it yet?"

Again, Jess didn't speak. She watched as Mars lowered her face into her hands. "Harry's right. Coil's been lying to us this whole time, hasn't he? Trickster too, really."

Marissa looked up, her eyes bleary with tears. "And you knew. Of course you knew."

"No one listens to me, Mars, you know that," Jess said, trying to soften the harshness of her tone. "They ignored me when we arrived, and they ignored me when the group voted to form a gang and turn villain. I suspected, but what good does that do me or anyone else? We're here, now. We voted as a group, and we're going to suffer the consequences of our actions as a group."

"Cody suffered our consequences all on his own."

"Which you voted for, because it was your interruption that got Accord so pissed off in the first place, and we voted that way because it was Cody that touched Noelle and caused the problem."

"And it was Trickster that made Noelle a monster," Mars finished in a dead-sounding voice. "Who made us all monsters. Oh my God, Jess, what do I do?"

 _Not 'what do we do',_ Jess couldn't help but noticed. "I'm shit at advice, and even if I weren't, you probably wouldn't listen anyway. You got to do what you think is right. Just…just be careful, whatever you do, Mars. None of us are in a good place."

"I wish Harry were here," Mars whispered. "He always seems to know what to say."

"Yeah, he's slippery like that."

Mars stood, head bowed with tears in her eyes, and left without saying another word.

~~Simurgh's Son~~

~~Simurgh's Son~~

"Bailey's gone, Boss," Dmitri said after a sharp rap on Coil's door.

Coil looked up, brow furrowed. "Gone? I saw him in his room during the lockdown."

Dmitri shrugged. "Doors on that floor are unlocked. Sundancer's out of her room too."

Coil branched off another universe. In one he stood and accompanied Dmitri up the stairs to the floor where the Travelers and Bailey lived. As Dmitri said, their doors were unlocked. The light was on in Bailey's room, with his pillows arranged to make it look like a body was still there. His phone sat on the nightstand.

Coil snapped it up and pulled out his own Tinker-based monitor. He didn't bother to question how the phone somehow obtained photos of naked young women. Instead, he concentrated on the last and seemingly only text the phone had ever received: _Need help now. Trainyard. –TT_

 _Tattletale_ _was in contact with Bailey._ _Bailey was in close contact with Sundancer._

Coil rushed out of Bailey's door with Dmitri at his side and into Genesis's room. She didn't seem surprised to see him. "Where are they?"

"They who?" she asked. "I thought we were on lockdown."

"Dmitri, if you please?"

The merc stepped past Coil, grabbed the young paraplegic's hair and roughly pulled her head back before placing a very large K-bar against her throat.

"As much as a value your services, Ms. Haskins, you must understand that circumstances are such that I cannot allow any threat to exist under my roof. You are either a part of this organization, and as such will cooperate, or you are a threat which must be dealt with. Decide now."

The lights around them dimmed, and from three floors down Coil could hear a massive, bestial roar. "What are they doing?" he demanded of the girl.

"Fuck you, Calvert."

It was not the foul language which convinced him, but the use of his civilian name. He nodded to Dmitri who ran the blade across her throat without hesitation. Her eyes widened in that all too-familiar moment of shock one enters when they realize they are shortly about to die.

He then collapsed that universe entirely. He was back in his office; Jess Haskins was in her room waiting to be interrogated, and both Harry and Sundancer were gone, presumably in contact with Tattletale. He spun another Universe off and ran from his room, Dmitri behind him as always. They picked up more men as they headed down to the third level. They reached the hall just in time to see a blinding white light from the vault, accompanied by a deafening roar.

It didn't surprise him that Trickster arrived just seconds later, though Ballistic was noticeably absent.

The lights in the hall were out; after that flash of blinding light they were cast in absolute darkness for the fifteen long seconds it took for the emergency back-up generator to cycle through its' restart.

By the time he reached the vault with the others, he saw Sundancer sitting cross-legged on the floor. She'd stripped off her costume completely, leaving herself only in athletic shorts and sports bra as if to strip herself of her cape identity entirely. She held her helmet between her hands as she wept in silence.

Within the vault, only darkness, but from it came the putrid, wafting smell of burned, rotting meat. The hint of a misshapen tentacle lay within a shaft of light from the emergency lights.

Trickster pushed past Coil and Dmitri, beyond caring who his employer was. "What'd you do?" Trickster shouted at her. "Mars, what'd you do?"

"She asked me to," Marissa whispered without looking up. "She asked me to end it. And I did. She was my friend before she was yours, and I owed her that much."

Trickster stood trembling in rage as he looked down at his former friend. His costume was a formal tuxedo with red lapels, white gloves, and a bisected red-white clown mask. With a half-articulated growl of almost insane rage, he raised a gloved fist and back-handed her across her cheek.

Marissa collapsed to the floor crying but made no effort to defend herself, though Coil doubted it was because of the blow. Trickster wasn't done, though. His rage and loss was too great to bear. Possibilities began to ferment. Coil held out his open palm to Dmitri, who knew without being told to hand over his sidearm. Coil offered it to Trickster, who stared back at the gun with the whites of his eyes clearly visible behind his mask.

"There can be no more Travelers after this," Coil said with absolute certainty.

Marissa had straightened and was bowing over her crossed legs again, weeping in quiet misery. Trickster snatched the gun from Coil's hand, shoved the barrel painfully across the arc of her skull and pulled the trigger three times, all within a second or two. It was a fast, brutal murder that forever would link Francis Krouse to Coil's side.

Marissa Newland, aged seventeen, toppled over to the floor. The shattered top of her skull began leaking extensively across the tiles. "Dmitri, make sure Mr. Bailey's fingerprints are on the weapon," Coil said.

Trickster said nothing as Dmitri took the gun. Instead, he stood frozen, staring down at the young woman he killed. Seconds later, Ballistic came tearing down the hall. "The fuck, Trickster?" he shouted. "What's….what's…. oh fuck. FUCK! MARS!"

Ballistic fell to his knees beside the corpse but didn't touch her. The damage was so brutal and evident there was no way she could be alive. "What the fuck happened?" Ballistic demanded—his own tears and anger evident behind his steel mask.

"It seems we were all terribly mistaken about Mr. Bailey," Coil said smoothly, even as he let the other Universe where he sat at his desk collapse, confirming his present course of action—and by extension the death of young Marissa Newland. In a sense, she was not truly dead until that moment.

"He's a cape, though I don't know for sure what his power is. He somehow mastered Sundancer and forced her to come down here and murder your friend Ms. Meinhardt. According to our security footage, he then shot her in the head and fled with my resident Thinker, a cape by the name of Tattletale. I believe he has joined the Undersiders now."

Ballistic looked at Coil, then Trickster, clearly shocked. "Little Man did this?"

"It was all a fucking act," Trickster snarled with a voice made thick by emotion. Coil approved how quickly Trickster realized what was happening. "Just an act to get into Mars's pants. I don't know why he did this, but I'm going to make him pay for it."

Ballistic stood up, fists clenching. "You and me both, brother," he declared. "You're right, though, he is a cape. He's got these funky tattoos that make him almost impervious. Alexandria-level. Bitch still has to breathe, though."

 _That_ was a surprise, Coil thought. "We must act quickly," Coil said. "We have a real opportunity here. My plans have been hampered, but the best plans are adaptable. Why go after the Undersiders ourselves, when we can have the Protectorate do it for us?" He turned to Dmitri. "Give the evacuation notice. Get my pet and all trace of us out of here in the next half hour."

To Ballistic and Trickster, he said, "I'm afraid your friend Genesis might also have been influenced by Bailey. I recommend caution, but keep her under control and I'll allow her to continue living."

"I'll take care of Jess," Ballistic promised.

"Good. Let's move, gentlemen. We have a lot to do and not very much time to do it. Oh, Dmitri, before you, leave, a moment."

After the two capes left, Coil said, "Accord's man, Dell. Put him in my spare costume, and then shoot him with that gun. We have Bailey's fingerprints. Manufacture proof that Bailey did this—all of it. I'll go underground for the time being to handle things on the civilian side."

"And the video surveillance?"

"Your man Jansen is quite skilled, I understand. Make it happen."

"Got it, boss."

Coil left behind the bodies and removed his PRT phone. He had quite a few calls to make and not much time to make them.

~~Simurgh's Son~~

~~Simurgh's Son~~

Lisa wouldn't stop throwing up. Harry was really starting to worry about it, but he was too busy trying to remember some type of healing charm that would keep Taylor alive. She was very, very badly hurt.

The bugs, though, were frankly freaking Harry out more than Lisa's constant sickness.

Almost the moment Harry got Taylor to the couch in his lair, insects started pouring into the warehouse. The wards he used did not do anything to stop them, and he was so freaked out over how hurt she was that he had a hard time concentrating on trying to find a way to deal with them. So he stood staring at a couch covered in squirming bugs while the only thinker in the house puked out her guts.

"Water?" Lisa asked.

 _That he could do._ Harry ran to his charmed refrigerator and grabbed a bottle of water for her. She took a swig, washed it around her mouth, and then spit it out. She then drained the whole bottle.

"Your teleportation sucks," she declared tiredly.

"I'm sorry! I didn't know it would make you so sick!"

"It fucked with my power," she said, as if he hadn't said anything. "Sent it crazy. It tried to absorb everything from the teleportation itself, couldn't handle it. Don't do that again."

"What if…?"

"DON'T do it again. If it means life or death, I'll die happy knowing I won't have to do that again. More water."

Harry tapped the bottle and filled back up. Rather than drink, Lisa stared. "What the fuck is that?"

"Water?"

"From where?"

"Conjured," Harry said. "I promise, its drinkable."

"You made water out of thin air."

"Yeah?"

"Condensed it?"

"Sure."

"How?"

"Magic."

"Magic? What's your power, Harry? You're obviously a cape. I saw where you were testing your powers."

"Magic. That's my power. I don't have a cape power like you or Taylor. Just magic."

"Can you magic up a cure for Taylor?"

"I'm trying," Harry muttered. "She's covered in bugs!"

He could see Lisa struggling to rub her eyes and focus on the couch where Taylor rested. She was barely visible underneath the carpet of squirming insects.

"Her power is so fucking gross," Lisa muttered. "She needs a doctor. I could call Coil to get a referral, but he's going to be upset with us."

"What do you mean?"

"My team is dead," Lisa said in a dull, flat tone. "I walked us into a fucking trap, and now they're dead."

"I…"

"Shut up, Harry. You're not the Thinker, you couldn't have known. I'm the dumbass who called you. Stupid! Stupid! Stupid!" She hit the bottle on her forehead, barely registering the water she spilled in the process.

Harry sank down cross-legged on the floor next to her, suddenly lightheaded as the full import of his first outing sank in. "I got Grue and Alec killed. All those other people?"

"Bakuda recruited with bombs in their heads," Lisa confirmed. "When she went, they went with her."

He felt like being sick again, but had nothing left to vomit. Instead, he took the bottle of water from Lisa and took his own swig before handing it back. "I need to try and remember healing spells," he said. "I know there are a lot out there."

"Remember? Healing spells?"

Harry shrugged. "I have like three or four hundred thousand years of memories from some immortal wizard named Harry Potter in my head. Got them when the Simurgh tried to kill me. It's where I learned about the runes, and how to make my staff. I have to try and use those memories to figure out how to heal her."

She stared at him, mouth agape. "I have nothing," she finally admitted.

He shrugged, closed his eyes, and started sifting through memories. He didn't know how long it took but when he had what he thought he needed he stood and summoned his staff. He slammed the butt of the staff down next to the couch, and in a flash of light all the bugs were blasted away from the couch, leaving Taylor slumped awkwardly.

His second spell created a perfect image of Taylor over her body, but hollow like an illustration of a body rather than the body itself. Various areas began to light up in red, demonstrating her many, many injuries.

"Holy shit she's hurt bad," Harry whispered.

Lisa had climbed to her feet, staring in shock at the magic. "That…no cape has that wide a diversity of power, except maybe Eidolon or Glaistig Uaine."

"Magic has no specific power, it just is," Harry explained. "It falls on the user how to shape it. So, easy stuff first. _Emendum._ "

He set his hand gently on her thigh to set the break, but instead the spider silk weave absorbed the magic into itself, calcifying until it was almost as hard as bone. "Huh," he muttered.

"What?"

"The spider silk is absorbing my magic," he said. "Wow, that's actually pretty cool. Do you think…?"

"Harry, not the time."

"Oh, right."

Lisa made a decision. "We need to get her out of her costume. I'm telling you now, if you say anything about her…"

"I won't, I promise."

It proved easier to say than do. The costume was essentially one piece that she pulled on from the back. They had to peal it back from her slowly, doing their best not to make her injuries worse. Harry was startled to see that she wore only a simple thin white shirt under the costume.

Her body looked black and blue—often more black than blue, as they pulled the rest of the silk off. "This stuff is amazing," Harry muttered. "I wonder if there really is a touch of magic in powers."

It took a lot of will not to stare. Her body was nothing like Marissa's, with her soft curves and gentle lines. Taylor's legs were shapely and long from running. But she was not soft and curvy. Her body looked lanky but strong.

"Well, let's get to it. _Emendum_." His hand on her thigh grew hot as his magic flushed into her skin, set the femur and then healed it. When he lifted his hand, the bruise had already started fading, though he knew it would remain for a week or two.

"This is so fucked up," Lisa whispered. "This is not how powers work!"

"Again, not a cape," Harry muttered as he healed her left shin. "Okay, this next part is really hard. I've never tried healing internal organs before. Or bones either, or anything for that matter. Can you step back a little? I really need to concentrate."

Despite trying to remember, he couldn't find any one spell that healed everything. Every single organ in the body had a dozen or more different spells designed to heal specific types of damage. Learning the spells was only half of what healers had to learn—most of their lessons was in distinguishing which spells to use, and when. Instead, healers developed what they called spell chains designed for specific situations.

If he read the diagnostic charm correctly, her left kidney was crushed, her liver was damaged and she had multiple perforations in her bowels. She was bleeding badly internally and had already developed sepsis in her bloodstream. Her whole body was going into shock. If he didn't heal her, she'd be dead before morning.

He laid his staff down and placed both his hands on her flat stomach. "Please let me get this right," he whispered.

Closing his eyes, he summoned the memories Potter had of learning these healing charms. Potter never had to use healing charms on his wives because of the healing properties of his bonds, but in the course of his many battles he determined a need to learn field healing for his soldiers. Harry picked the simplest of the field healing spell chains for internal injuries.

"Help me," he whispered.

His hands moved almost of their own accord and he heard words spill from his lips with a strong, confident tone he'd never used in his life. He felt his magic directed by the words like a conductor's baton leading an orchestra. He saw a faint yellow light seeping through the skin of her stomach. The chain of words continued beyond when he would have thought to stop, being driven by a feeling of necessity and determination, until finally the magic stopped flowing.

"Did it work?" Lisa asked.

"Yeah, think so. Not sure it was me, though. Felt almost like someone else." He leaned back, inexplicably tired. Healing spells didn't use brunt-force levels of magic as far as he knew, but he was still exhausted. "Well, might as well do the hardest part."

"What?"

"The brain."

Lisa stared at him. "You can heal brains?"

"We'll find out shortly."

Lisa leaned forward and gripped his wrist. "Harry, not even Panacea touches brains."

He shrugged. "I'm not going to take a risk, Lisa. Not here, not now. The mages in my memory existed far into the future. They mixed magic and technology, and developed spells based on an advanced knowledge of how the human brain works. I won't touch any neurons, but if there's any actual tissue damage, swelling or bleeding I can heal it. At least, the memories say I can."

She crossed her arms, unconvinced, but nodded. Harry gently placed his hands around Taylor's bloodied face and turned her toward him. He propped her eyelids open with his thumbs to reveal dilated, unresponsive pupils.

The spell made him feel like he was falling into her eyes. Through his own, the magic shaped his vision much like he imagined a three-dimensional scan would. There was swelling, but thankfully no bleeding he could see. The damage was chemical and electrical, and even he knew not to mess with that. She was just severely concussed.

He quickly backed out. "Concussion only, nothing really physical to heal," he said softly. He turned to Lisa. "What do we do now?"

"The ABB is just about gone," Lisa said. "PRT and police are probably out in force about now. She's going to need rest, and the only place I can think of for that is her house. With Grue and Alec gone, I have no idea what Bitch is going to do. I…" She stopped speaking and abruptly walked away, arms crossed.

"I'm sorry." It was all he could think to say.

"Doesn't matter." She didn't turn to look at him, and despite all the magic he'd learned, Harry felt absolutely helpless.

"What can I do?" he finally asked.

Still without looking at him, she said, "Can you get us to her house without that shit-teleporting of yours?"

Harry looked down at his staff, then back at the two girls. "Er, not easily. I suppose I could levitate the couch, but that might be a little obvious. We might all be able to…oh, right. Feather-weight charms. Yeah, I can get you to her house if you don't mind a tight fit."

She finally turned and stared at him. "Your staff flies." She said it as a statement, somehow putting the facts together.

Harry summoned it to him and nodded. "Yeah. Mages enchanted things to fly all the time, but usually broomsticks."

Her breath sounded ragged, followed by a slightly hysterical smile. "Of course. Broomsticks and staffs. Fine. Fly us to our hideout first; she has some clothes there. Then to her house."

"Okay." A second thought. "Where is it?"

"I'll point when we're in the air."

At her direction, Harry cast the feather-weight charm on Taylor. Lisa frowned intently when she was able to lift the taller girl without any problem. Harry mounted the front of his staff and then stood very still when Lisa put Taylor right behind him in her only partially dressed state, leaning limply on his back, while she sat at the end using her arms and his belt as a safety hardness to keep Taylor on.

"Fly like you have an injured girl on your staff," she said with a straight face.

"Right." There were so many jokes he wanted to make about that, but even he realized it just wasn't the time.

He felt Lisa's hands pull him painfully as they left the ground. "Holy shit," she whispered. "This is fucking impossible."

Harry didn't answer—he was having too hard a time controlling the staff with the odd weight load. He was regretting not putting a feather-weight charm on Lisa too. Then again, with him sitting so far forward he would probably have flipped off. They rose up through one of the many holes in the roof of the warehouse, and with their new elevation he could see fires and first responder emergency lights flashing all around the town, with a large concentration not a mile away in the train yard.

 _My god, it's all my fault,_ Harry thought to himself.

Somehow, someway, he had to make this all right again.

* * *

Additional A/N: As a writer, I quite often let my characters guide the story. I'll present a situation, and then imagine how a character would react and tell the story accordingly. In part because he was raised by villains, Harry Bailey despises villainy. If he ever felt himself truly free of Coil, he would join the Wards in a second because he idolizes Legend and wants to be a hero like Legend is. Which is where authorial decision-making comes in. I don't want Harry to be in the Wards. I don't want Taylor or Lisa in the Wards. So, rather than twist my characters to fit a plot point (like a recent movie that twisted a character who would never hurt a child ever, for any reason, into one who came close to slaughtering a boy in his sleep to fit a crap-filled, pus-bucket plot point), I had to present a circumstance which would preclude the possibility. And I had to do so in a way that was a reasonable course of action for the other characters.

It's up to the readership to decide if it worked or not. Still, this was a hard chapter for me to write. And I completely understand if it's too much for some readers. Next chapter is going to be hard too, but then things get much better.


	14. Metamorphosis 3

A/N: Review responses for the last chapter are in my forums like normal. I will confess that I really, really need to stop letting myself get derailed by my SW rants in my forums. Bad Darth Marrs, Bad! Meantime, one more rather harsh chapter. And a personally apology to all of you Sons of Bitch out there. Sorry.

* * *

 **Metamorphosis 2.3**

Miss Militia did not trust Thomas Calvert.

Something about the man reminded her of the men who dragged her and all the other children out of her village to be used as living mine sweepers that fateful day so long ago when she triggered. He had that same look of disinterest in his eyes—as if the lives of those around him were simply assets to be used and spent down whenever he thought appropriate.

Unfortunately Piggot vouched for him, and Legend sang his praises all the way from New York. The moment Thomas Calvert left retirement to help the flagging Protectorate ENE office, his credentials were well established. It was well known that when Piggot finally had to retire due to her failing health, Calvert would be taking her position.

Despite Miss Militia's misgivings, when Calvert called requesting immediate PRT and police back up, Armsmaster and Director Piggot both decided she would accompany the response team, since everyone else was out dealing with the ABB nightmare that was rocking the city.

By the time she reached the parking garage, which rose up with brand new splendor from a dilapidated part of town that had no need for such a structure, the BBPD was already onsite, as was Calvert and several of his men. Miss Militia recognized his lieutenant, Dmitri, who transferred down from New York. They were all wearing their Protectorate ENE sweater vests.

Calvert himself looked as if someone had shot his dog.

"What do we have?" she asked.

"A fuck up," Calvert said bluntly. "My fuck up. I screwed up, Miss Millitia. I thought I was doing something good, but I really missed the mark. Come on, I'll show you."

He led her and her support team of PRT agents team to a large elevator to what looked like an old abandoned Endbringer shelter. "You know I did consulting with Fortress Consulting before I rejoined the PRT," he explained. "I'd do independent audits, and discovered that one of our shelters simply disappeared one day. So, I started doing some more investigating and realized I'd found Coil. I rejoined the PRT specifically to lead the investigation into his operation."

Coil was an enigma among the Brockton Bay villains. Like Accord in Boston, Coil seemed less inclined to claim property as to use surgical strikes to further his own ends, whatever those happened to be.

They climbed down a set of stairs until they came to a hallway lit not by overheads, but by forensic lights spaced all around. The smell was awful, but Hanna continued on unfaltering behind Calvert.

She paused when she saw the body—a pretty young blonde, the color of her hair almost lost under the exposed contents of her skull. She recognized the striking red and black body armor with the star motif that was piled on the floor by the partially undressed body. Sundancer—one of the most powerful blasters in the United States.

Further beyond, the torso of another pretty girl and the remains of what looked like a monster of some kind. Between them, with a bullet hole behind his eyes, lay the masked, costumed figure of Coil himself.

"What the hell happened here?" she whispered. Capes did not murder with guns, not like this.

She was surprised by a sob from Calvert. "It was Harry." He ground his teeth and made a show of wiping a tear. "I thought I was making a difference. Legend said he was a good kid who needed a good home, and I tried my best to give that to him. Instead, I find he was not just working for Coil, but…but…"

Dmitri quietly responded to something over his radio. "We got the surveillance, boss," he said.

Calvert nodded. "Miss Militia?"

"Yes, let's go see."

The surveillance room appeared to be on the second floor in what looked to be Coil's own office. Everything was cleaned out save the computer with the security monitors attached. Another of Calvert's team sat there quickly typing. Without being prompted the woman spun the monitor around.

The footage was grainy black and white. She saw Sundancer in full costume holding a miniature sun in front of her. Walking behind her, a hand gently resting on the back of her head, came Harry Bailey just as he looked when he had his interview with New Wave.

 _It appears Panacea may have been right about him,_ she thought to herself.

Under his apparent Master control, he seemed to force Sundance to attack one of her friends, who was screaming silently for her to stop, hands outstretched. When the first girl died, Sundancer turned her devastating power on to something Hannah could only describe as a Case 53.

Coil appeared on screen, striking Bailey with an elbow to the temple while tackling Sundancer to the ground. Hannah fought to understand why Sundancer stared a moment at the girl she just killed before she began stripping off her custom. Coil, meanwhile, went after Bailey.

By the time Bailey shot the villain, Sundancer had stripped to her underclothes and simply collapsed to the floor. Bailey walked right up to her, placed the gun to the top of her skull and fired three times before turning to leave the frame.

"Two dead capes, possibly three, caught on camera," Hannah summarized numbly. "Any idea where the suspect is now?"

"I received a report from Shadow Stalker that a new cape showed up with the Undersides and obliterated Bakuda and most of the ABB just minutes after this happened," Calvert said. "The timing would be a big coincidence if the new cape _wasn't_ Bailey, especially given the body count in the train yard. Teleportation. It looks like that's his MMO."

"Recommendation?"

"APB, full master protocols for Bailey and anyone caught with him," Calvert said. "Given how easily he appeared to control Sundancer, it might be wise to bring in someone not subject to any possible Master influence."

Hannah stared. "You mean Dragon? Isn't that a little extreme?"

Instead of answering, Coil waved at the video surveillance. The sheer brutality of the killings went above the norm for cape-on-cape violence. The gangs in Brockton Bay knew and usually adhered to the unwritten rules. Murder as callous and brutal as what Hannah just witnessed was far different than the way the area gangs normally operated. The sheer bloodshed that saw the end to Bakuda's bombing campaign hinted at the same.

"I'll contact Armsmaster," she finally said. "Dragon has a quick deployment suit in Boston that can be here in half an hour or less."

"Good. In the meantime, I'm taking a team to my house. Maybe we can find some clues on Harry's computer regarding what he was trying to do."

~~Simurgh's Son~~

~~Simurgh's Son~~

Harry flew agonizingly slow toward the center of the Docks neighborhood, following Lisa's direction. Eventually they came to a good sized but long-abandoned factory made of red brick in the middle of the city's ancient industrial section, from when Brockton Bay was a leading textile manufacturer. The factory probably dated back to the 19th century and still bore a faded sign announcing it as Redmond Welding. He brought them down by a massive but rusted metal door and chain.

He carried Taylor while Lisa led them around the side of the building where they found a smaller door. She reached for the door but suddenly paused, frowning in the gloom of the unlit alley. With the charm on Taylor she wasn't hard to hold, but it still seemed a bit odd to just stand there, with a mostly undressed girl in his arms.

Something was wrong. Tattletale turned to look at him, eyes-wide, and started to push him a second before the wall door and the wall around it exploded. The force of the explosion pushed Lisa into Harry and Taylor, making all three fall.

The figure that stepped out was painfully familiar to Harry. Worse yet, the figure took a look at him and recognized him instantly.

 _Shit._ Harry left his mask back at his own lair.

"You little fuck," Ballistic snarled. "You little shit. You think we wouldn't find out?"

"Find out what?" Harry's voice squeaked.

"What fucking mojo did you put her under, Harry?" Ballistic snarled. "What'd you do to her? Marissa wouldn't have fucking killed Noelle in a million years! You did it to her, and then you fucking shot her in the head. Why? Who's paying you?"

"What?" _Damn it, why does my voice keep squeaking?_

"Coil," Lisa blurted. "Coil's setting us up. Shit. My last text, Harry. I didn't scrub it."

"I deleted it!"

"That doesn't remove it from the memory, it just hides it. Ballistic, it wasn't Harry! He was saving us from Bakuda tonight!"

"Bullshit, you lying little bitch!" Ballistic rushed forward and backhanded Lisa with his armored fist. She spun around, a surprised expression and a terrible angle to her jaw as she fell into Harry's arms. "I saw the video, Bailey! I saw you standing by Sundancer when she burned Noelle to ash! I saw you shoot her in the head!"

Not only was his voice squeaking, Harry felt tears welling in his eyes. _Marissa was dead. Oh my God._ "Luke, I promise, I'd never hurt her. Never! She was the only good thing I'd ever had. Please, please believe me!"

"You're a good liar, Little Man," Ballistic sneered. He spit out the nickname he used on Harry like a curse. "You fooled everyone. You're not going to fool me again. I may not be able to kill you with my power, but I can kill your little friends, and…"

Harry grabbed Taylor, grabbed Lisa, and disapparated.

The moment they landed, Lisa screamed in an incoherent mix of rage and pain and slapped him. He stunned her and caught her gently to lay her down on the dirty floor of the warehouse, and then healed her jaw. Only then did he wake her up again. He was alarmed by the tears in her eyes.

"Fuck fuck fuck I told you never to do that again," she whispered. She squeezed the palms of her hands against her eyes. "Fuck that hurts!"

"I didn't know what else to do!" Harry said.

"Blast him like you did Bakuda! Just don't fucking teleport me ever again!" She rolled on her side, and with her newly healed jaw, vomited bile.

Harry started to offer to help somehow when Ballistic's words hit him. They hit him so hard he stumbled and collapsed onto the couch, leaving Taylor and Lisa both on the ground.

"Marissa's dead." The tears welled at the corner of his eyes, spilling down his cheeks. "Why? Why'd they kill Marissa?"

Lisa sat up and folded her knees under her chin. She still looked deathly pale and was rubbing her jaw, which despite being healed probably still really hurt. The look she gave him, though, looked like it hurt worse. "It's my fault. I talked her into killing Noelle."

Harry stared, his own jaw gaping like a fish. "But…why?"

"Because she was the only one who could. Her power doesn't require line of sight and isn't limited by the Manton Effect. It would take something on the order of a controlled fusion reaction to destroy a potential S-class threat. I…if Coil checked your phone and saw my last text, and you weren't in bed, he'd know we were in collusion together. He probably discovered how I was skimming all his accounts. Fuck!"

She bowed her head almost to her knees, holding the palms of her hands to her eyes. When she sat up, her eyes were red but dry. "He had the Travelers precisely because he wanted Noelle. Without her, the rest were expendable. By making it look like you were controlling Sundancer, and then shot her, Coil'd make sure the rest were your enemies as well. He's setting us both up to ensure we either die, or get a kill order. I'll be surprised if he doesn't somehow blame the whole Bakuda thing on us too with the PRT."

She stood up and walked to his fridge. "In the meantime, we have a concussed friend and…two Cokes and …snack cakes. Lots of snack cakes." She took a soda and a cake and quickly consumed both. "Now one Coke. Still lots of cakes though."

"What do we do?" Harry asked, completely flummoxed.

"That's a good question. Taylor's place is out—because of you, Coil knows who she is. How safe is this place?"

"Moderately. I might be able to make it real safe, but it'll take a few days." He considered his options. "Do…does Coil know where you live?"

"Yes," she said. From the flat tone of his voice, he could tell she thought it was both a stupid question, and a reminder that she'd lost everything as well.

"I…look. I can turn invisible. How 'bout I apparate back to your lair? Now that I've been there, I can return. I'll get some clothes and any food I can find, and come back."

"Invisible?" She shook her head. "Don't care. Go get what you can. I'll look after Taylor."

Harry made sure to put his mask on before he cast the disillusionment charm on his himself. He summoned his staff and with a surge of will, left Taylor and Lisa alone.

He could tell within a minute that Luke wasn't there anymore. It had only been a few minutes, but he must have left quickly. Even so, Harry remained perfectly still in the dark alleyway, waiting for some sign Coil's people were still there. When nothing happened after a few minutes, Harry mounted his staff and levitated up along the wall of the factory until he reached one of the second-floor windows.

The second level had been converted to a comfortable, modern-looking loft. He concentrated a moment and teleported through the wall, but stayed mounted and in the air. Again, he remained still, floating a few feet off the floor, and waited for someone to notice.

Two armed men in black pants and bulging tactical vests stepped out of what looked like a kitchen area, each carrying a can of soda. Though he couldn't name them, he recognized them both as Coil's men. One spoke something quickly into the radio strapped to his shoulder, and then the two men settled down on one of the couches.

Given how poorly his first attempt at heroic action went, Harry hesitated on what to do, but the truth was he need to know what was happening and he couldn't find that out on his own.

Slowly, he drifted down to the floor, brandished his staff, and as quick as he could cast two stunners to the back of the men's heads. Both slumped in place, never having even seen the magic.

Harry retained his disillusionment charm as he stepped around the couch and pulled one of the men's eyes opened. "Hope this works," he muttered. " _Legilimens!"_

Despite having learned about the mind-reading charm in many of Harry's memories, he was utterly unprepared for the chaotic rush of imaginings, thoughts and the man's memories. He floundered, utterly lost, and backed out again with tears in his eyes and a throbbing pain in his head. "Huh, pretty sure I did that wrong."

As frustrating as it was, the most advanced and nuanced magics just couldn't be learned from memories alone. At least, not so far. He considered trying again, but his head hurt enough he feared he might damage himself. He stunned both men again and then disarmed them both. Perhaps Lisa could us their equipment.

The loft was divided into rooms. He entered the first, following the faint scent of dogs, but stopped at the door.

He'd found Bitch. A black bolt, like from a crossbow, protruded from the center of her forehead, and from the heads of all her dogs.

The next room had several sets of stylish clothes. It was only the utter lack of feminine underwear that made Harry realize it was Regent's room, and not Tattletale's. Hers was the next room over. He found a convenient backpack and stuffed all the clothes he could into it, even including a pair of trainers.

The last room had a paperweight of a bug caught in amber, and a week's worth of clothes—all baggy and unbecoming. Definitely Taylor's. He found another bag and stuffed the clothes and personal items in the back, before finally taking the paperweight and putting it in as well.

After a moment's consideration, Harry remembered he could shrink things. Another moment after that, and he remembered how. He placed Taylor's shrunken bag in the backpack before moving on to the kitchen area.

He found the kitchen well stocked with canned and dry foods. More importantly, he found a good portable grill and a spare butane canister. He bagged the food and then shrunk it, along with the grill. He felt uncomfortable shrinking a compressed container of flammable gas. That he just forced into the backpack as it was.

As he stepped out into the main loft and saw the two men, he suddenly had another thought. A brief search found the men's phones—each carried two. He ignored the smart phones, figuring they were all locked with security codes. Instead, he took one of the disposable flip phones and opened it up.

He dialed 911.

" _Nine-one-one, what's you're emergency?"_ The voice sounded feminine but firm, like a stern mother speaking to unruly children.

Harry took a deep breath. "I'm a…cape. I need to report a crime against another cape, but I don't know the PRT number. Can you connect me?"

" _One moment._ "

Harry looked about him for any sign he might have already been detected. At some point, he was sure his disillusionment had worn off because he could see himself now.

" _PRT ENE, who is speaking_?"

Harry felt his stomach drop. He recognized the voice—it was the first voice he heard upon leaving the plane that brought him to America.

Thomas Calvert.

Worse yet, Harry had no doubt that the PRT could triangulate where he was calling from very quickly, and likely identify what number he was calling from. He snapped the phone shut, tossed it over the balcony of the loft, and then blasted it into dust with his staff.

"Bloody 'ell, he can't win this easy!"

In the distance, he heard a siren fast approaching. He gathered everything he'd collected and disapparated back to the warehouse.

His witch light had gone out when he arrived, casting the whole space in darkness. "Lisa?" he called out. "Are you there?"

He had only a moment to see a flash of blinding blue light before something painfully cold struck him in the face. He tried to cry out, but his mouth filled with bitter-tasting fluid. He fell back, desperately clawing at his face while fighting to breathe. Almost at the same time, something heavy and wet hit him in the back of his head, forcing him mask-first into the ground. He swallowed reflexively. He tried to get up, but the wet substance seemed to expand explosively all around him, catching his limbs and torso in a vice-like grip that completely froze him. None of that mattered, though, as an impossibly heavy lethargy dragged him quickly down into darkness.

~~Simurgh's Son~~

~~Simurgh's Son~~

 _They looked at him with a terrible, crushing hope. The five young women who bound themselves to him to lead their rebellion were so sure of their cause that they risked their lives to sneak onto the planet from their own colony world and perform the ritual to wake him almost four thousand years after his birth._

"… _crush any opposition," the new Lady Gryffindor explained to him within the bowels of the Mage Institute, previously known as Hogwarts. "Any differing opinion is crushed immediately, and if anyone tries to oppose the Hierarchy they're subjected to a Death of Personality and rebuilt as a ward of the state! They did it to my brother when he discovered Councilor Aldar was shipping Mage-enhanced torpedoes to the Romulan Resurgence!"_

 _Harry Potter might have been seventeen again, but the soul within was already a thousand years old. "So, just to get this right," Harry said. "You snuck onto Caldos without permission from the ruling council, this Hierarchy, you used your great uncle's wand to slip past the wards to reach the heartstone, and summoned me back to life for what, to run your little rebellion?"_

 _Their shoulders sagged and their faces dropped into frowns of disappointment at his lack of enthusiasm. "We didn't know what else to do," the new Lady Slytherin said. "The last rebellion was crushed, and our complaints to the Federation Council were dismissed as 'unsubstantiated'." She made exaggerated quotation marks with her fingers. "Everything is stacked against the people, Harry Potter. My great grandmother told me before she died that when everything looked impossible, and there wasn't any hope for the people, to think of you."_

 _Lady Potter cleared her throat and met Harry's gaze squarely. "The government of Caldos has fallen to the darkest of Magics, Harry. Personality wipes, mass murder, the elimination of personal freedoms, and treason by violating the treaty with the Federation by arming and funding anti-Federation militant groups. You're the Forever Mage. We are your people. Please help us."_

 _Harry sighed bitterly. "I never said I wouldn't help. I just_ hate _being the bad guy."_


	15. Metamorphosis 4

A/N: Chap 14 review responses are in my forums like normal. And with this chapter, we finally see Harry with a chance to flex some magical muscle.

* * *

 **Metamorphosis 2.4**

Given the microscope he was under in the hours after Bailey's arrest, Coil did not have the luxury of going to even his civilian home, much less overseeing the move of information and materiel to his secondary base. He'd split off his universes several times to ensure that his pet was safely ensconced in his secondary facilities, with a now wholly dedicated Trickster and Ballistic leading his mercenaries in her defense.

Genesis, sadly, stayed in her new room without her computers or games, and moped. He had no doubt she would either see the light soon, or die.

He'd already pulled in favors to ensure the trial would start in hours, rather than days. All it took was photos of Marissa Newland's and Noelle Meinhardt's bodies to impel those who felt odd about a rushed trial. Nothing got attention like the deaths of beautiful young women. It wouldn't be the first time dangerous parahumans were rushed through the legal system, nor would it be the last.

Coil, however, knew that Bailey and Tattletale especially could not be allowed to testify. And as soon as their trial was over, he would ensure that they would all die in a failed escape attempt. Hence his current text conversation on a secure, private encrypted cell phone in his office with his associate in Boston.

 _Conviction guaranteed. Travel by land, estimated travel time 55 hours. Must look like failed escape attempt._

He waited with barely controlled patience for the response. _Negative. I have just been informed that the subjects are to be contained at all cost, but not killed._

Coil went very, very still as his mind raced. As with everything about Accord, the phrasing was most definitely deliberate. This was not Accord telling Coil to leave the subjects alive. No, it was much more compelling than that.

He spun off another universe in which he agreed with Accord, but then contacted the Dragonslayers. Within minutes of the conversation with the mercenaries, he was dead. Even in his alternate universe, _he never saw who killed him._

That universe collapsed on its own with his death. He glanced down at his phone.

 _I trust you understand, now?_

Accord likely had a good idea of Coil's power, just as Coil understood Accord's. And Accord had known Coil just used his power to test the warning.

 _I do, thank you. I'll ensure the three are found guilty and will employ Master protocols to ensure silence until containment is secure._ _I will have to be underground for a time._

 _Understood._

The message ended. Coil removed the sim card and destroyed it before shredding the phone. He sat at his desk and stared into the Void, trying to figure out why Cauldron of all groups wanted Bailey alive.

~~Simurgh's Son~~

~~Simurgh's Son~~

Consciousness came in blurs. Harry heard people speaking even if he couldn't understand what they were saying. He saw light sometimes, but no clear images. His head spun with terrible vertigo and his stomach boiled; that was the only real thing he knew for certain. For everything else, he couldn't tell what was real and what was imagined.

The lethargy wore off briefly. He blinked gummy eyes open to see the interior of what looked like a partially lit cinder-block courtroom. He tried to speak but a metal ball filled his mouth, held tight with bands so thoroughly wrapped around his head he couldn't move or bite through them. What confused him was a familiar voice he'd hoped never to hear again.

Justinian? His former 'owner' sounded like he was talking over the phone. "Bloody terrified me, is what he did. I had to lie—he _made_ me lie. All it takes is words, and he can control anyone around him. He told me not to tell anyone, and I _couldn't_ tell anyone. Frankly I'm glad you lot are onto him, I'm just sorry at the cost."

"Thank you, Mr. Justinian." Harry didn't recognize who spoke to his former owner, a man who gladly murdered a school counselor and her family when he'd asked for help.

"The state rests, Judge Stiggard."

"Defense?"

"Your honor, I really do have to protest this entire hearing!" Again, Harry didn't recognize the voice nor could he crane his neck to see. The voice was female and older. "You've given no time for discovery at all. We're ignoring all due process! This boy is only sixteen years old, and the Hebert girl is only fifteen! The state is asking for lifetime incarceration in a literal hell-hole without any possibility of parole. It's unconscionable!"

"Hebert's age didn't keep her from using a parahuman power to murder Rachel Lindt and two PRT agents in the Undersider's lair," the prosecutor pointed out. "Linda, there's a reason why we rush trials for capes like these. They're too dangerous to hold in any normal facility. Bailey is a confirmed Master 8, Brute 10 and Mover 7. He could teleport away and master a new victim before you could say his name, given the chance. Hebert controls insects! We found living bugs inside every body cavity of Lindt and the PRT agents who were attempting to bring her in for protective custody. She had ants literally eat through the dead girl's skull. And Livsey is a Thinker 7, obviously the mastermind of the whole thing. Kids or not, these parahumans are simply too dangerous to allow to remain free."

"Given all we have seen and heard tonight, I'm inclined to agree."

Harry flicked his eyes to an old, heavy-set man with square jowls and wisps of thin white hair clinging tenaciously to the sides of his otherwise bald head.

"As authorized by the Federal Parahuman Protection Act, this court finds Taylor Hebert guilty of using a parahuman power in the murder of Rachel Lindt, aka Hellhound, PRT Agent Ross Michaels and PRT Agent Jeffrey Lacombe. Likewise, this court finds Harry Bailey guilty of using a parahuman power in the murder of Noelle Meinhardt, Dell Landers, aka Coil, Marissa Newland, aka Sundancer, Brian Laborn, aka Grue, and Alec Vasil, aka Regent. Finally, this court finds Sarah Livsey, Aka Wilbourn, guilty of the use of a parahuman power in the conspiracy to commit the murder of all the aforementioned victims, conspiracy to defraud and theft. Given the sheer number of victims that piled up so very quickly, and given Harry Bailey's history of abusing parahuman abilities as heard this evening, the court hereby sentences all three of the defendants to life without…."

Something wet and cold sprayed into the back of Harry's throat from the gag that filled his mouth. He was out before he heard anything else.

~~Simurgh's Son~~

~~Simurgh's Son~~

Harry woke gagging. His eyes popped wide open when he tried reaching for whatever it was that was choking him, but the urge became panic when he found he could not move his arms, legs, or any other part of his body.

"Calm down, Bailey, before you aspirate."

Calm. _Occlumency._

It was hard, so damned hard, to force his mind to _click_. Once it did, though, he was able to take deep breaths through his nose. Doing so, he realized that he wasn't choking, _he was still gagged._

Moreover, he was moving. He blinked his eyes against the dimly lit interior of what looked like a large armored truck. Facing opposite him was Lisa, masked and so thoroughly contained he could see nothing of her but her eyes and a few wisps of her blonde hair. Like him, she appeared to be gagged by a metal mask that wrapped securely around her whole head. He caught the hint of bright orange on her shoulders, but the rest was lost in a thick mound of off-white containment foam.

To his right was the one who spoke. Taylor Hebert didn't have a mask, but she had a thick metal collar around her neck with a red blinking light under her left ear. Like Lisa, though, she was also thoroughly secured in foam.

To his left was someone he'd never see before, a pretty woman with the brightest yellow…hair? Feathers? He couldn't quite figure out what was sprouting from her head. Like Lisa, she was gagged. She was looking about with wide, terrified eyes, but she wasn't struggling. Perhaps she'd given up already.

Harry tested his restraints and realized he was bound by metal bars under his own spray of foam. Moving his eyes alone revealed a metal collar similar to Taylor's. "It shoots you up with a tranquilizer if you try anything," Taylor said. She was the only one who could speak. Her head hung low, her long, curly dark hair obscuring her face.

The sound of banging brought Taylor's and Harry's eyes to Lisa, who made the sound with the cage surrounding her head. Once she had their attention, she nodded toward Harry while looking meaningfully at Taylor.

Taylor sighed. "So, yeah. We're fucked. I mean, really, really fucked. It's all your fault too. We're on our way to the Birdcage. We've all been convicted under the Three Strikes Act, because of you. Well, you, Lisa and me. Not sure about Feathers, there."

Harry couldn't help but stare as the realization sank in that he hadn't imagined the courtroom scene.

Taylor leaned her head back against the thick metal wall of the truck in obvious frustration. "Congratulations," she continued in a voice brimming with hatred. "You've been classified as a Master 8, a Brute 10 and Mover 7. You know how they try Masters? They shut you up. Know how they try Mover 7s? They keep you unconscious. So, you were gagged and unconscious while Judge Donald Stiggard of the New Hampshire Superior Court sentenced us all three to a short, violent life in hell."

Occlumency or not, Harry tried and failed to shook his head. Taylor didn't care.

She met his gaze. What he saw made his heart skip a beat: rage. Pure, unadulterated rage. "Grue is dead because of you," she said. Her voice didn't sound heated; it sounded cold and lifeless. "You better pray to God there aren't any bugs in the Birdcage, because if there are I'm going to make a swarm of cockroaches crawl up your ass while you're sleeping and eat you from the inside out. They wouldn't even let me talk to my dad!"

Her pain and anger was unbearable to see, especially because it really had been his fault Grue died. He stared intently at the ceiling of the truck. Somehow, someway, he had to make this right. He couldn't do that from inside the Birdcage.

A second later, he discovered that in fact _will_ alone really wasn't enough to disapparate. He needed to be able to move, even just a little. He'd never noticed before because he'd never had his movement so restricted, but now that he couldn't even move half an inch with both the metal and the foam, he couldn't force his magic to start the process of teleporting.

 _What other options do I have?_ Within its efficient, magically refined channels of thought, his mind began going through everything he knew about containment foam. It was flame and water resistant, the ultimate containment material for parahumans. Its tensile strength was enough to contain even high level brutes.

It…was matter. Magic could _vanish_ matter.

Harry couldn't speak, but by the sheer necessity of learning Post-Caldosian magic without a wand, Harry didn't need to speak the spell. He mentally shaped his desire and forced his magic to flow through that desire, using his will alone instead of a spell and a wand. The magic surged through his arm and out his right hand.

He could see Tattletale's eyes widen in shock as the foam around his hand simply popped away. With his hand now free at the wrist, he cast the magic again, pointing to his left arm this time. The foam disappeared to his shoulder, leaving only the metal braces. He could feel needles project from the collar, but they couldn't pierce or even constrict his neck because of his runes.

Unfortunately, their captors anticipated that. He felt a fluid spray from the interior of his gag directly into his mouth, just like in the court. Desperately he bunched his tongue at the back of his throat to keep from swallowing it while he continued to vanish bits and pieces of his containment. The metal straps followed the foam, then his collar. He ripped the gag off and spat the tranquilizer on the floor. He conjured water and rinsed his mouth out several times.

Even doing so, he could feel a deep drowsiness settling on his shoulders. He drifted on Occlumency in order to finish removing his restraints before he vanished Lisa's collar first, and then her foam. She reached up and removed her ball gag. "How the hell…never mind. Magic, forget I asked," she said. She turned to look at Taylor while Harry fought against the urge to lay down and sleep.

She walked up to Taylor and took the taller girl's cheeks in her hands. "Honey, I know you're mad, and I know you blame Harry for everything, but you have to know this is a frame up. Coil is Thomas Calvert, an Assistant Director at the PRT ENE headquarters. He's the one who testified against us last night during the emergency trial. This is his way of removing us before we exposed his identity. Noelle Meinhardt was an S-Class threat. She was miserable and wanted to die. And Sundancer killed her because she loved her enough to give her that release. Harry couldn't have shot Sundancer or Noelle, he was trying to save us from Bakuda. Coil manufactured the video, simple as that."

"He fucking failed saving anybody, didn't he?" Taylor snarled.

"Yeah," Harry said. He sounded sluggish even in his own ears. "Yeah, I did. I didn't…I didn't know she'd blow up. The spell was just supposed to knock her away from you guys. And my shield wasn't big enough to protect everyone, just myself and those behind me. I…I'm sorry, Taylor. I'm so sorry."

He raised his hand and vanished her collar, then her foam. She stood free, clad in the same bright orange jumpsuit as the rest of them, and then swung a hard right hook at his chin. The blow didn't hurt, but it did push him back a step.

"Sorry doesn't bring him back," Taylor hissed. Moisture beaded at her eyes, but Harry couldn't tell if they were tears of sadness or rage. "It doesn't bring any of it back. They didn't even let me talk to my dad!"

"Coil murdered my girlfriend and then convicted me for the crime," he said simply.

He wasn't sure if it was his tone or message, but Taylor blinked for a second and seemed to lose some of her rage. "Sundancer was your girlfriend?"

"For a few months," Lisa said from the side. "Taylor, it really wasn't his fault. Please, if not him, then believe me. I've never lied to you."

Taylor shook her head and sagged against the wall. "What does it matter? We're almost to the Birdcage by now."

"You're right, we're sorta short on time," Lisa said. She turned to the fourth person in the van, who'd been watching the whole drama with wide eyes. Lisa reached up and removed the remaining woman's gag. "I'm assuming you're a master. Name?"

"Paige."

Lisa blinked as he mind raced. "Mcabee. Right, Canary. Read about you on PHO. Oh honey, you were shafted almost as bad as we were. Harry, free her. She's coming with us."

Harry vanished her foam with a sleepy wave of his hand.

"How's he doing that?" Paige asked.

"No fucking idea, don't care, his power makes my head hurt." Lisa said. "Harry, I…" She closed her eyes and cursed. "I hate you, I hate asking this, but can you teleport us?"

"Wait, what?" Taylor straightened. "You mean he really can teleport?"

"Yeah, and it sucks ass like no one's business," Lisa said.

"Where'd we go?" Harry asked, ignoring the comment on his apparition. "It has to be somewhere I've been."

"Coil's old base. I guarantee he abandoned it after Sundancer killed Noelle. There's no better place to hide than a place he's already abandoned."

She turned to Taylor. "This is really, really going to fuck with your powers. As much as I hate it, though, it's still better than the Birdcage. Paige, it'll mean being a villain, but do you want to come with us?"

"I don't like hurting people," Paige said quickly.

"Don't worry, we won't ever ask you to," Lisa promised.

"I…yes, I guess."

All four women looked at Harry. "You know I got a mouthful of tranquilizer a second ago, right?" he asked.

Taylor hit him again. Just the shock was enough to wake him up. "Er, thanks?"

"Don't worry, I'll do it again," she promised darkly.

Harry sighed. "I need to be able to touch everyone. Whoever hates me the least hug me, the other two I'll grab your arms."

Lisa shrugged and stepped forward to wrap her arms around his chest. He gripped Taylor and Paige's arms and, free to move, disapparated all four of them to the open common area of Coil's old base.

Immediately all four of them went flying sideways at fifty-five miles an hour toward the nearest wall. "Shit!" Harry screamed. He managed a wild, broad cushioning charm that made them bounce off the wall before falling to the floor.

"What the hell was that?" Taylor screamed. She didn't appear sick so much as really, really angry.

"I forgot it's not a good idea to disapparate from a moving vehicle," Harry said.

"How could you forget something like that?" Taylor said.

"Hey, I'm still learning how to do this stuff, okay? You're free, why don't you show a little gratitude!"

"Because you got my friends killed!" She screamed as she hit him again. "Brian was the only boy who was ever nice to me!"

She swung again, but this time Harry caught her hand. "I tried to be nice to you too, remember?" He didn't yell, he just met her gaze with forced calm. "And you told me to fuck off because you thought I was with Hess. I wasn't, Taylor. I just hated bullies and wanted to help you."

She jerked her hand away. "Doesn't help Grue, though, does it?"

"No, guess it doesn't."

"Are you guys going to kill each other or something?" the new girl asked worriedly.

"No," Lisa said firmly. "We're just all hurt. Three of our friends were killed two days ago, and we weren't given any time to grieve before the blame was all heaped on us. And now we're all known, named fugitives. Once they sentence you to the Birdcage, they unmask you."

Harry looked around their surroundings. Just as Lisa predicted, there was no sign at all Coil ever housed a base there. Which meant…

"Dinah Alcott," Harry said.

"Still captured," Lisa said. "He'll be drugging her two or three times a day to get her hooked."

"Who?" Taylor asked. "Alcott, the mayor's niece?"

Lisa nodded. "That's what set all this in motion. Our bank robbery? That was cover for Coil to kidnap the Alcott girl. She's a powerful pre-cog and he wanted her power. Harry found out and just vowed hell and high water to get her out. He made me promise to help. Coil must have found out we were working together and…well, here we are."

"She's twelve," Harry said darkly as he looked at Taylor. "She's the same age I was when Marko kidnapped me from the foster home. He found out I could sense capes. All my guardians in the UK? Villains, selling me to each other as a slave. Thomas Calvert bought me and brought me here to identify all the Wards and E88 members. I…I identified you too, that's how he knew who you were. I'm sorry, I didn't know what he was planning, I was just his fucking slave."

"Not anymore," Lisa said. "Look, I have money spread out in spots around the city, close to two million. We need to get some cash and find a place to set up a lair up. This place was a good landing spot, but we don't want to stay in a known location, and I'm fairly certain someone was monitoring everything we did and said in that truck. Essentials—food, shelter, clothing. We survive. Paige, you're welcome to stay, but if you have some place to go…"

The feather-haired girl shrugged. "I was sentenced to the Birdcage. I don't have any place to go. No family. Nothing."

"Then you're welcome to stay with us. Watch out for Harry—he's a genuinely good kid, but he's a total perv."

Harry shrugged, not bothering to argue the point. "I'm a sixteen-year-old boy. I like boobs. Sue me."

Canary shook her head, obviously still trying to adjust. Taylor, though, looked around with a frown. "We've been unmasked. We can't go anywhere without attracting attention. These prison jumpsuits don't help."

Lisa turned to stare at Harry. He blinked, still struggling to fight off the tranquilizer. "What?"

"You tell me, magic boy. You got any mojo to let us go out in public?"

"No, I don't have anything other than glamours and transfiguration and…oh, yeah. Guess I do." He laughed tiredly. "This is so weird. Um, Canary, want to go first?"

"I'm sorry, but not really," she said with a shrug.

Lisa huffed and stepped right up to him. "Me first. Do something about these jumpsuits."

Harry nodded, gripped her shoulders, and transfigured the jumpsuit into her normal jeans and a simple lavender sweater.

"Holy God," Canary whispered. "How did he do that?"

"He got mind-fucked by the Simurgh as a kid, and now he can do magic," Lisa explained before Harry could say anything. "Now, features."

Harry nodded and cast a mild glamour. Without any fan-fare or slow morphing effects, her hair turned black, her eyes brown, and her nose lengthened. Those three changes radically altered her appearance. She turned to Taylor who nodded, her jaws slightly agape.

"Okay, that's cool," Canary said. "Can you make me a dress?"

"Sure." He did so.

She looked down and then glared at him. "With a little less exposed cleavage, please?"

Harry frowned sadly. "Okay. Are you sure, though? Like that you won't need a glamor 'cause no one's going to be looking at your face."

Lisa barked a laugh, but Canary insisted, so he shifted her dress to a pretty blue denim number without any exposed cleavage. He changed her hair to brunette and caused her chin to jut out with a glamor.

"Wow," she breathed. "The dress feels so real!"

"Oh, it is," Harry assured her. "The glamors are just on your face. The clothes are real, though. I transfigured the jumpsuits. The glamour will last about twelve hours, but the transfiguration should last a week. The wizard I got my memories and magic from used to go whole months wearing the same set of clothes. He'd transfigure them into pajamas at night and work clothes during the day. His wife made him stop though."

Canary obviously didn't know what to say to that. Harry finally turned to Taylor. "I'm…what would you like?"

"Same as Lisa's, but make the sweater black."

Harry did as she asked, and then made her blonde with a rounder face.

"Okay," Lisa said. She clapped her hands, an eager gleam in her eyes. "Girls, let's go get some money, and then buy some shit. Harry, go do whatever you want to do. Take a nap or something."

"Yeah. Um, first, do you know where they might have my staff?"

"Burned it, probably," Lisa said.

Harry laughed. "Alexandria might be able to snap it, and Sundancer might have been able to burn it, but short of that nothing would break it. I'd really like it back."

"The PRT has a storage facility at Broadmoor and 17th," Lisa said. She frowned a little, and then suddenly grinned as she looked from Canary to Harry.

"What?" the older woman asked.

"Harry's not a Master, not like what Coil set him up to be," Lisa said. "But you are. How'd you actually like to get back at the fucks that sent you away?"

Canary hugged herself, genuinely disconcerted by grin on Lisa's face that made her look like she was the fox that just got charged with guarding the hen house. "I don't want to hurt anyone."

"That's just it, you don't have to," Lisa said. "You can politely ask the guards at the evidence lock up to let you and Harry in, and to let him get his staff. No one gets hurt. And then, because you were so nice to get him his stuff back, he'll owe you big time. Like take you shopping and buy you anything you want, big time."

"I don't have any money," Harry said.

"You will," Lisa promised. "So, I have no idea what time it is, but let's say we all meet on the Boardwalk by Fugly Bob's at sundown. I should have some cash, so we can eat and then talk about finding a place to hide."


	16. Metamorphosis 5

A/N: Review responses for the last chapter are in my forums like normal. Formatting might be different, had some trouble uploading the chapter so ended up doing some cut and pasting.

* * *

 **Metamorphosis 2.5**

"So, Paige, right? How old are you?"

She gave him a withering look. "Old enough to go to jail if I did even a tenth of what you're obviously thinking."

"Hell, probably not even a tenth," Harry muttered. They sat in the back of a dirty bus driving slowly, by starts and stops, into downtown Brockton Bay. "Don't worry, I seem to be the antithesis of lucky when it comes to girls." It took an effort of will not to think about Marissa. He wondered if Jess blamed him just like Luke did.

His own glamour gave him blonde hair and blue eyes, just like his disguise when he infiltrated Medhall. He wanted very much to ask his travelling companion how she got sentenced to the Birdcage, but though some might call him dense, Lisa sent him enough warning looks before they parted ways that he figured out it probably would be a bad idea to ask.

All he knew was that the pretty older woman looked lost, confused and utterly hopeless. In fact she looked just like he felt. Finally they reached the Broadmoor stop. He offered Canary a hand when she stepped off the bus; she hesitated only a moment before accepting it.

"Thank you."

It rankled Harry that he was both hungry and thirsty, but had no money to get anything. He suspected she was the same. Fortunately it was only a short walk before they reached the address Lisa indicated.

Being a late afternoon on a... "What day is it?" he asked, genuinely confused.

"I was sentenced on Monday and shipped out this morning with you guys. So, Tuesday?"

Harry nodded and tried to ignore the crowds around him. "Point me my staff," he whispered. He had to concentrate to limit how visible the magical line was, but he saw it pointing to an unmarked, unremarkable brownstone building across the street.

"It's there," he said. "Are you okay with using your power to keep anyone from getting hurt? I mean, I have stunning spells, but they still send people flying and they could still get hurt."

She hugged herself again, looking unsure and a little scared. "I guess," she said.

Harry ran a hand through his hair. "Tell me now. Lisa wasn't joking, we'll never ask you to hurt anyone, or do anything you're not comfortable with. But we're unmasked fugitives. If they catch us, we're back in the Birdcage. I'll fight and hurt people if I have to, but I'd rather not if there's an alternative."

"I know. I get it." She stiffened her shoulders and then started across the street when the light changed. He followed, looking forward to getting his stuff.

The door set off a loud electronic _ding._ The space inside the door was barely large enough for the two of them. Set to the left of the door was a counter with a heavy fiberglass window that ran to the ceiling. Set within the window was a speaker grill and a smaller transaction window. Behind it sat a rather large-boned woman in Brockton Bay PD black.

"We're not open to the public, sweetie," she said firmly but kindly to Canary.

Canary opened her mouth and squeaked. She looked at Harry, an expression of hopelessness paralyzing her features. Harry sighed and then apparated to the open floor space right behind the officer. He put a hand on the startled woman's shoulders.

"Ma'am, my name is Harry Bailey," he said with a low, calm voice. "I escaped from a truck taking me to the Birdcage less than two hours ago. I'm been convicted of several counts of murder. Word has it I'm a very, very bad boy. My friend and I need to recover some of my property. If we can do that without anyone getting hurt, that would be better. But I'm pretty desperate and I will hurt you if I have to. Will you let my friend in and guide me to my things?"

"Hurt me all you want, punk, I'm not doing shit for you." The cop spit angrily. "You fucking parahumans are all the same—thinking power gets you everything? Well, fuck you. I don't got a power, but I have the key code and you ain't…"

"Please open the door and let us recover our things," Canary said sweetly.

Her voice was so mellifluous and magical Harry felt his whole body respond to it, almost like the Veela made Potter respond in his memories. The cop shrugged, all anger forgotten. "Sure thing, Sweetie."

She punched a red button and the door into the facility opened to let Canary in. The ensorcelled officer then led them down a short hallway to a heavy vault door with a security panel set to one side. The cop quickly entered the security code.

"Mage's things are on Row 12, bins 45 and 46," the cop said.

"Thank you so much," Canary said with a genuine smile. "Does this place have any vending machines? I'd love a Diet Pepsi."

"Sure, darling, whatever you need." The cop turned and walked away.

Harry stared at Canary. "I love you. Will you marry me? You could like…order me to leave the toilet lid down and stuff."

"Shut up, Jailbait." There was no power in the command, but Harry suspected with Occlumency he could resist. Maybe. Unless she ordered him to help her relieve all her physical tension or something like that. He was fairly certain he wouldn't be able to resist a command like that.

He laughed. "Open-ended offer, in case nothing better comes up later!"

They walked through row after long row, each stacked ceiling high, of confiscated material. Harry grabbed an evidence bag from inside the door and started claiming things he thought might help. He grabbed a couple of pistols and ammunition clips, several tasers, batons and…

"Crap, this is Taylor's costume!" he said. He grabbed her things and shoved them all into the bag. Frowning, he then cast a space expansion charm and expanded the bag's interior exponentially. It didn't even dawn on him it that he just used a spell he'd ever used or even consciously thought about.

"Think your stuff is in here?"

"I was sentenced in Boston," Canary said sadly.

"Oh. Well, no worries, we'll…oh cool, a laptop! Four laptops! Shit, Tokahamas! These are top of the line, extra graphics and a Z9 processor! If our new place has internet, Lisa will want these." He grabbed all four and then moved on until he reached his own stuff.

Absently he handed the bag to Canary. She stumbled in surprise at how light it was, but Harry didn't care. He climbed the little ladder to reach the top bins where he found his Mage costume, and draped over the bins, his staff.

The staff hummed in his hand. "Hello, beautiful," he whispered. "You know, I got to use this damn thing just one night before I got arrested."

"It's very pretty," Canary said. "What is it?"

"Magic staff. Like Merlin or Gandalf. It focuses my magic and makes casting big things bigger. I can also fly on it."

"Magic? Like Myrrdin?"

"Er, no. Myrddin's a cape. His power looks like magic, but it's still a cape power. Something to do with dimensions. I'm actually a wizard, with real magic. I can cast spells that can do almost anything because magic's only real limitation is my imagination."

She looked skeptical. "And the Simurgh did this to you? I saw the Time Life cover."

"Yeah, hate that picture. She did, sort of. Since she killed my folks, I've had memories of a boy named Harry Potter who sacrificed a part of his soul and became sorta immortal. So, I have hundreds of thousands of years of memories of magic and technology that would make a tinker faint. I didn't realize what it meant until I came here and discovered the magic in my memories worked. That bag's proof."

She shrugged. "I believe you. I mean, why not? So, anything else you need?"

Harry started to shake his head, but then suddenly laughed as he thought of an absurd idea.

Canary looked worried. "What?"

"Oh, you ever see the old pre-Endbringer Disney movie, _Sword in the Stone_?"

"Disney? Didn't Leviathan…?"

"Yeah, but did you ever see the movie?"

He took her hand and led her to the front of the evidence room, put the bag down and expanded it even more. He winked at her. "Watch this."

He lifted his staff and said aloud, " _Pack!_ "

The entire room exploded in a flurry of movement that scared Canary so badly she knelt down and covered her head with her arms. It was only after a second or two that she looked up to see every piece of evidence flying off the various shelves and into the open, endless duffel bag.

Twenty seconds later, the room was empty. "Pretty cool, eh?"

Canary stood and looked around in amazement. "Okay, that was pretty cool," she admitted. She glanced at him and almost smiled. "Still not marrying you, though."

"Open-ended." Harry picked up the evidence bag, charmed feather light, and the two started walking toward the vault door. It was about that time Harry realized that the ensorcelled cop hadn't returned with Canary's Diet Pepsi. _Figures she'd be a Pepsi girl._

"So," Harry asked casually. "If you used your power to ask a cop to bring you a Pepsi, would the suggestion wear off?"

"No, not until…" Her eyes widened.

The vault door opened, but it wasn't a cop standing on the other side. Harry stepped in front of Canary, who squeaked in alarm as the heavily armored, imposing form of Armsmaster filled the door. Harry waved.

"Hey, Armsmaster. How are you?"

"Hairy Bailey," the hero said. "Ms. McAbee. If you surrender, I promise you will not be harmed."

"At least not until you ship us to the Birdcage," Harry said. "Hey, you know Legend, right? I have to ask, before you beat us up and everything. Do you think he knew?"

"Knew what?"

Harry knew his grin was sick-looking because he was feeling sick when he made it. "That I was a slave? That every one of my so-called guardians since I was twelve was a cape villain who used my cape sensitivity to find and recruit or kill capes? Marko, Colbert, Justinian? All cape villains. Know how much Thomas Calvert paid for me? Only $50,000. That's all my life was worth. You know that Thomas Calvert _is_ Coil, right? That he shot Marissa and made it look like I did it? That we're innocent?"

"That's for a court to decide, Mr. Bailey."

"Yeah, the court already did, didn't it?" Harry was surprised at the surge of emotion he felt, speaking to this hero. "I wanted to be like you. I wanted to be like Legend. I kept praying he'd come and adopt me. He saved me, why wouldn't he keep me, you know? I know it was because I was Simurgh-influenced, at least I know now. But I was eight. How the fuck is an eight-year-old orphan supposed to understand shit like that? I wanted to be a hero so much. And now you've forced me to be a villain. Great job."

Armsmaster raised a bristling halberd toward them. Harry spun backwards into Paige, and a moment later the two were back in his abandoned warehouse.

He should have let her go, but instead he clung to her, trembling as he fought to control the emotions that raged across his mind. He should have clicked into Occlumency, but some small corner of his mind decided he _deserved_ to feel this way; that he deserved a moment of rage, anger and self-pity.

Evidently Canary thought he did too, because she gently wrapped her arms around his shoulder and hugged him. "Are you alright?"

Harry shrugged as he backed off. "Just fucked in the head is all," he muttered into his shoulder. He finally stepped back. "This would normally be the part where I make a stupid sex joke or something. Just doesn't seem right, though. Rain check?"

She laughed a little, though it was a sad sounding laugh. "Okay."

Harry glanced around the old warehouse, once again empty. "You know, I like this place. I wonder how they got past the wards?"

"Wards?"

"Like a magical security System. Had something to make people just not want to see it, and made it impossible to plot on a map."

Paige shrugged. "I don't know."

"I bet Lisa does." He put the bag down with a sticking and then disillusionment charm to make sure no one found it, then transfigured Paige's dress into black slacks and a great sweater. He transfigured his shirt into an off-white sweater, and then changed both their glamours slightly. "Okay, I'm starving, and Lisa said she had money. Think it's close to sundown?"

"Let's go find out," Paige said. She smiled at him.

~~Simurgh's Son~~

~~Simurgh's Son~~

As tempted as Harry was to disapparate, especially given the fact that Paige for some reason didn't react as badly to his unique form of teleportation as Lisa or Taylor, he didn't want to risk the possibility of appearing in front of a cop or a group of strangers and ruining the chance of a meal. They walked quickly and caught a bus after a while.

By the time they reached the Boardwalk, it was sundown and the evening crowd had already formed at Fugly Bob's. Canary caught sight of Lisa and Taylor sitting at one of the porch tables and led the way to join them.

"So, who's buying?" Harry asked brightly as they sat.

The two girls didn't look impressed. "I am," Lisa said. "Four of my stashes were gone, but I have enough for us to get by for a while. Any luck on your part?"

"Oh yeah. I found all our stuff," Harry said. "I didn't see yours for sure, Lisa, but I bet it's in there. Also grabbed some laptops and guns and…"

"He said a word and made the whole evidence locker room fly into a duffel bag," Canary said in a flat tone. "It scared the hell out of me. The bag only weighs a few pounds."

"Where?" Lisa asked, eyes-wide.

"Back at the warehouse. Hey, did you ever found out how they found us?"

"Coil convinced the PRT to issue a kill order. They called in Dragon."

Harry frowned. "So what? I mean, I had protections on that warehouse that should have prevented anything short of killer robots from finding it."

Lisa shrugged. "The results speak for themselves."

Harry frowned but then concentrated on food when the waiter came by to take their orders. The waiter gave Harry a skeptical look when he ordered a beer, though. "I'll have one too, thanks," Canary said sweetly.

The waiter blinked and then sagged as his face melted into a goofy smile. "Okay."

Lisa and Taylor both stared at her. She shrugged. "I figure I owe him one."

"We're going to get married someday," Harry vowed. "Just as soon as she says yes. I can say 'Get me a beer honey,' and she can ask a complete stranger to go buy beer for us. It's like the foundation for a perfect relationship. Like...like…love at first sip!"

Canary shook her head, more flabbergasted than upset. She turned to Lisa and asked, "Is he always like this?"

"Only when he's nervous or scared," Lisa said.

Harry shrugged. "It's a coping mechanism, like Taylor's cold glare of death-rage and Lisa's habit of ripping people's souls apart if they get on her bad side."

Taylor gave him a cold glare of death-rage. "If anyone ever does sleep with you, Bailey, it'll be pity sex to just shut you the hell up."

Harry shrugged. "I'm sixteen, any sex from me is probably pitiful."

"Not what I…you know what, never mind. Holy God, what is that?"

The other stared in awe at the plate-sized pile of fat, grease and carbohydrates. Eight Fugly Bob hamburger patties were layered between mounds of cheese, onions, chili-cheese fries and topped with three fried eggs, all smooshed between what looked like waffles soaked in syrup.

"You know, that makes me a little nauseous," Paige whispered, paling. She leaned away from Harry as he took a fork and knife.

"What? I'm hungry. Besides, if I eat it all it's free! Doing may part to save us money!"

He then eyed the beer eagerly and took a swig. "Ah, that's the stuff. Even this American piss is better than nothing. Been drinking beer in the UK since I was fourteen. Thanks, love!" He winked at Canary and then laid into enough food not just to feed the whole table, but to give them all heart attacks as well.

"I got us rooms as the Bay View," Lisa said. She visibly shuddered as she glanced at Harry eating. "We all need good beds and bathrooms."

Harry looked up, grinning with his mouth full.

"You have your own room, Harry."

His grin died. He shrugged and went back to eating. Beside him, Canary chuckled. "I wouldn't mind sharing a room with you girls if it helped."

"Oh, it'll help. All three of us will share. I got two queens, I figure you and I would fit on one. Taylor's a tosser."

Harry looked up in time to see Taylor's jaw drop. "How could you possibly know that?"

Lisa shrugged and grinned before taking a bite of her fried chicken wrap, which was the healthiest thing Fugly Bob sold.

Half way through his dinner, Harry took a break to enjoy his beer. "So, I've been thinking 'bout where we can lay up full time. That warehouse by the boat graveyard is a pretty sweet deal. More importantly, I think I can make it pretty secure."

Taylor scowled. "Forgive us if we don't trust your definition of secure."

Harry shrugged. "Then I'll spell it out for you. Unbreakable walls. Invisible to anyone but who we choose. Probably a sublevel. Instantly fixed back to new condition, with any changes we want. Could survive a direct nuclear strike. Probably take me a week to draw out the rune scheme for the heartstone, and then another week to actually program the stone itself. I'd need Lisa or Taylor to double check to make sure what I draw on the stone matches the drawings, but when done it would rebuild the warehouse anyway I want it."

"What the hell does that even mean?" Taylor asked.

Harry took a bite of his Challenger.

"It's like I've been telling you. I don't have a power. Powers do one or two things. To do more, you have to have more than one power, like Eidolon. But magic is just energy, a type of non-linear, intra-dimensional anaphasic radiation generated by the vibration of the cosmic strings that hold the universe together. Some entities could manipulate this energy. Some, like Mages, could do more than just manipulate it. We could _program_ it, like a computer. Through post-Caldosian rune schemes Mages could direct their magic to build skyscrapers from dirt and clear farmland or make ocean-going sailing ships space-worthy. That's what I'm talking about—writing a runic program to direct my magic to rebuild that warehouse to what we want."

He took a swig of beer and started the second half of his meal before noticing the silence at the table. "What?"

"I've seen the perv," Lisa said. "I've seen the video of the wounded orphan. I've even seen the fumbling cape. Just the first time I've seen the eternal mage."

Harry sputtered. "Eat your wrap." He then continued eating.

To the shock and mild disgust of his companions, Harry's meal was free that night. They gathered the clothes and personnel affects Taylor and Lisa bought while gathering their cash and started back to the Bay View, which fortunately was right off the Boardwalk for the convenience of Brockton Bay's mild tourist industry.

They took a suite of rooms on the third floor with a central living area and a small kitchenette. Once Harry had a feeling for the interior, he disapparated to the warehouse and collected their duffel bag. He returned a moment later to find the girls in the living area divvying up their spoils.

Lisa didn't even blink when he apparated in. "Harry, come get essentials."

Toothbrush, paste and floss. Check. Soap and shampoo—both generic but the good kind of generic, not the All-Mart crap. Check. Fresh underwear, sleeping shorts and a few sets of day clothes, all in his size?

Check. "You're awesome," Harry said. "Oh, I have a few Tokahama laptops in that bag somewhere if you want to get online."

Lisa's eyes dilated. He could actually see her pupils enlarge. It was rather freaky, actually. She left her spoils as if in a daze and leaned over to unzip the bag and reach in. Unfortunately, the bag was nearly bottomless and she started to fall with a shriek. Harry caught her and levitated her back out where she stood glaring at him.

"The fuck?" she asked.

Harry shrugged. "How else was I going to get the entire evidence locker in there? I expanded the inside. Here…" He summoned one of the laptops and handed it to her. He then summoned a power cable, since he was sure the battery was probably out.

"I hate you," Lisa said.

"I…you don't really, do you?" Harry asked earnestly.

Lisa sighed. "No."

"Because if you don't then you could…"

"No. Go to bed, Harry. You're tired, and you're probably going to have a heart attack after that monstrosity you ate."

Harry stifled a yawn. "I am pretty wiped. Okay. See you girls tomorrow." He stumbled to his bed, closed the door and changed into one of the sets of sleeping shorts. He had no intention of actually sleeping, because he didn't sleep. However, he hoped that he'd be able to find some help in his memories about the ward scheme he wanted to use.

Naturally, he just managed to get the covers up before he was asleep.


	17. Metamorphosis 6

A/N: Chap 16 review responses are in my forums. And now...a short, talky chapter.

* * *

 **Metamorphosis 2.6**

When Harry woke up the next morning, it was to a feeling of confusion and fear. Was he drugged again? He never slept, ever. Yet here he was, waking up in a comfortable bed feeling more rested that at any point he could remember. For a brief moment he wanted to get up, find Hermione and talk to her about how well….wait. _What?_

The memory that came suddenly upon him didn't _feel_ like someone else's memories. The image of Hermione's smile whenever he told her how much he loved her felt like his own memories. It felt like something that happened just days ago. He could _feel_ the way she wrapped her legs around him when they…

But then he remembered watching her die. The last memory he had of his second life. They all died—Luna, Daphne, Susan, Ginny and Hermione. Colonel Green lined them up, one at a time, and shot them like animals. He…he…

The door clicked upon and Lisa stepped in briskly. "Harry, it's…" She froze and frowned. "What's wrong?"

Harry opened his mouth to answer, but at first he couldn't speak. Finally he forced the words out. "He killed them. He killed them, and made me watch."

Lisa's face went utterly blank as she walked to the edge of his bed. She was already dressed in casual slacks and a cream-colored blouse that made her look much older than she was. "Who killed them, Harry?"

"Colonel Green." The rage and incalculable loss made his eyes sting. "They were trying to evacuate as many people as they could to the castle, but he caught them. He caught them and he…he…he shot them. He shot my family! My wives. He took my wives away from me. I couldn't live…"

Tears rolled down his cheeks and his throat felt as it would swell closed with the agonizing pain that just seemed to roll over him.

"What's your last name, Harry?" Lisa asked.

"What? What does that have to do with anything! That bloody monster shot my wives!"

"I know," she said gently. "I know, and I'm so sorry. But we have to know your name to make it better, don't we?"

"It's Pot…it's…." Harry frowned intently, his grief suddenly stuck in confusion. "I slept last night," he finally said.

"That's good, isn't it?"

"I haven't slept since London. I just see memories. Earth, Caldos. The galaxy dying, the new Galaxy. And…and…Amanda. Amanda was there, over and over again. I just…it's…" His limbs began to shake; he stared at his trembling fingers in confusion. "I don't know…I…who am I?"

"Taylor, get in here!" Lisa shouted over his shoulder.

"Taylor? Who's…I knew a Taylor. Taylor Freelan, Mordon Colony, 2679 CE. He was…"

The right hook sent him sprawling off the bed. He rolled quickly to his feet, hands taking on a sinister red glow. "The fuck, Hebert? What was that for?"

Lisa sighed and glanced at Taylor. "Great job, thanks."

"What was all that about?" Taylor asked.

"Not sure, but sounded like he got lost in his memories."

"I'm right here, you know," Harry said. Then he frowned and sniffed. "Shit, have I been crying? What the hell did you guys do to me last night? Did you spike my drink? I mean, really, I'm about the easiest date you could find, you don't have to spike my drink!"

Lisa sighed. "You smell bad. Go take a shower. All we have is cereal for breakfast. We've got a long day ahead of us."

He glared at them. "Why are you in here? I'm sitting here in sleeping shorts. Why can't I see you in your undies?"

"You already did," Taylor pointed out. She didn't sound happy.

Harry thought about it before nodding. "Yeah, guess I did. You have some pretty fantastic legs, Hebert."

"I'd say you look good, but I'd be lying," she said. "Go take a shower."

"Fuck you very much," Harry announced, though in a light tone. All sign of his anger and loss seemed forgotten. For his shoulder on the way to the bathroom, he added, "Get out of my room."

"I'm paying for it," Lisa pointed out.

"With Coil's money," came the reply.

"Yeah, got nothing," Lisa said. "Come on, Taylor, I'm hungry."

By the time Harry got out of the bathroom and dressed, the entire morning episode had fled from his mind. He went into their shared living room where Lisa was already installed on her laptop, Taylor was on a second, and Paige was watching television.

"Congratulations, we made national headlines," Paige said when she saw him.

Harry found a half-eaten box of cereal and poured milk directly into the plastic lining of the box. He opened it all the way and ate it from there rather than bothering with one of the plastic bowls Lisa purchased. He moved in and sat on the couch beside Paige to watch.

"That's a shitty picture of me," he declared. "But damn, Paige, your headshot looks awesome!"

"Thanks," she said, not bothering to be embarrassed any more by his juvenile fawning.

He watched the headline on their escape before blinking in surprise. "Hey, did you know they rescinded the kill order?" Harry asked.

"Yes." "Yes." "Yes."

Harry stared at the three girls around him before sighing. "Right, of course I'm the last to know. Did they say why?"

"Investigating irregularities in our trial," Taylor responded without looking up.

"Huh. So, what should we do?"

"Nothing different," Lisa said. She turned to face the room. "Okay, so, I guess now that we're awake and…shit, Bailey, were you raised in a barn?"

"What?"

"You're eating milk and cereal from the box!"

"I was raised by supervillains, deal with it," Harry muttered. "Mary and Joseph, you're not my mum or anything." He took another heaping spoonful, before finishing it by tilting the box up and just pouring everything into his mouth.

"It's a miracle he's not the size of a house," Taylor muttered.

Harry shrugged. "Magic takes energy. I need roughly twice to three times the calories as a normal kid my size. So, what are we doing?"

"Meeting," Lisa said. She pulled the rolling chair from the desk to the opposite side of the coffee table from them. Taylor, at the small dining table, moved her chair closer as well. Paige shut off the television.

Lisa cleared her throat and looked around their small group. "So here's our situation. Even if they cancel our Birdcage sentence, we're still classified as villains for escaping. And Paige, your conviction was legal, even if it was bullshit. So, we're villains. No going back."

"If we have a lair, I wanna monorail," Harry declared. "Monorails are so cool."

Taylor put her hand to her forehead, muttering. Paige, though, chuckled. "You're cute, Harry."

He beamed and looked at Lisa. "She thinks I'm cute."

"Still jailbait, though," Paige added.

Harry's smile died. Taylor grinned.

"So, we have about one point five mil either in cash or with a Parahuman banker Coil used, called the Number Man. Completely neutral, and he's been running numbers since before I was born. Harry has an idea for a lair that doesn't make any sense at all, but nothing he says does and it still works. Question we have to decide is, do we stay together? And if we do, what _will_ we do as a group?"

Harry snorted. "I'm hanging out with three pretty girls. Even if all I get to do is look, I'm good with us staying together."

Lisa turned to Taylor, grinning. "He thinks you're pretty."

"I think it has less to do with appearance and more to do with being female. He probably thinks Director Piggott with the PRT is pretty."

Harry shrugged. "You should have seen pictures of her when she was young. She was a PRT commando, back when they thought unpowered people could make a difference. Love women in uniform."

Taylor rolled her eyes. Paige, though, leaned forward. "I don't know what I can contribute. I…never wanted to hurt anyone. I just wanted to sing. But you saved my life. I wouldn't have survived the Birdcage, I know I wouldn't have. And you all seem nice, mostly. I'd like to stay with you, if I could. I just don't know what I'd contribute."

"We'll figure something out, Honey," Lisa said. "So, just to be clear. I'm a Thinker, 7 or 8 on a good day. Taylor is a Master 8 with total control over insects. Her first outing she damn-near killed Lung—you know, the guy who turns into a fiery dragon and went toe-to-toe with Leviathan? She's a heavy hitter in the right circumstances. Canary you're a Master 8 for humans. PRT considers that high risk, so I wonder if you weren't doomed to begin with. Then there's whatever the hell Harry is."

"I'm a Mage," Harry said. "A wizard."

"Okay. Taylor, stay?"

"Yeah."

Lisa nodded. "Good, we stay together then. Next step, if we're to be taken seriously, we need a group name."

"The Harpies!" Harry declared. He saw their faces. "What? That's a great name."

"That's a shit name, and you should be embarrassed for thinking it," Lisa assured him brightly. "What about…"

"Jailbirds!" Harry blurted again.

"I kind of like that one," Paige said.

Harry beamed.

Taylor started to protest, but Lisa produced a pen from the folds of her hair and wrote the name down. "Okay, it's an idea."

Harry beamed specifically at Taylor.

"What, are you twelve?" she asked.

"Are you forty?" he countered. "You're my age, stop acting like an old woman! And… ahhahaha. Not funny, Hebert. I hate spiders."

A jumping spider left his hand for the table, crossing it until he reached Taylor. She lifted it onto the back of her hand where it seemed to disappear into her clothing. "See," she said. "I'm not an old woman. Next one's going to be a black widow."

Harry glared. "Bring it. Ballistic hit me with his most powerful shot and it didn't even hurt with my runes!"

"You have several body cavities…"

"Children, the adults are talking," Lisa snapped.

Harry sat back down; Taylor gave him her patented glare of death-rage. Paige giggled. "You two are like brother and sister almost."

"Never!" Taylor said vehemently.

"Yeah, it'd be weird perving over my sister's legs," Harry said.

"Shush, you two. Group names?"

"Well, we're a group of girls and Harry's wizard," Paige said. "What about Coven?"

Taylor opened her mouth, but then paused. "You know, it has a ring to it."

"And that would make me _your_ wizard." Harry waggled his brows at Canary.

She smiled at him, but then shook her head. "Sorry, not going to happen."

"I won't be under age forever."

"I'm fairly certain I'm gay."

Harry opened his mouth, eyes wide, then shut his mouth with an audible _clack_. "Really?"

"Yeah, think so. Was definitely leaning that way before my one and only boyfriend tried to weasel his way back into my life."

"Could I watch?"

Taylor moaned, and even Paige grabbed a pillow and hit him with it. "Okay, seriously," he said once he stopped laughing. "I like Coven. It sounds faintly ominous like a good villain group name, but with connotations of protection and solidarity."

"Let's take a vote then," Lisa said.

They all voted. "Okay, it's official. We're now Coven, no article in front. Next, what's our shtick?"

"Let's shtick it to the man!" Harry declared.

"Good God, will he never stop?" Taylor asked.

"That was actually kind of funny," Canary said.

"You're encouraging him!" Taylor accused.

"He's like a puppy, I can't help it."

Harry stuck his tongue out at Taylor, and then began spitting violently when a fly landed on it. "Do you want me to turn you into a freaking aardvark?" he demanded.

"Back to the question…" Lisa began.

"We make the city better," Taylor said, as grim and unnervingly serious as she normally was. He was desperately trying to recall if he'd ever seen her smile. "We take on the gangs and make the streets safe."

"Great plan," Lisa agreed. "How do we pay for it?"

Harry shrugged. "We hit the gangs where it'd hurt the most—we take their money. We free their prostitutes and slaves. We burn their businesses and fronts down. And in the meantime Lisa opens a brokerage account and starts day trading."

All three girls stare at him.

"See, this is why I don't like you," Lisa said. "You go from 'let me watch you have sex with a girl' and 'monorails are awesome' to a suggestion that's actually smart."

"In my defense, watching girl sex on a monorail would be pretty awesome," Harry calmly pointed out, only to receive another pillow to the face.

"We need to establish rules on sexual harassment," Paige said.

"Agreed," Taylor seconded.

Harry laughed and sat. "Seriously, most of Coil's money came from Fortress Construction, right? We don't have to sell drugs or be pimps to make money. We'll be villains in name only."

"Aren't there government-sponsored Thinkers whose job it is to stop other Thinkers from tanking the economy?" Taylor asked. "A Thinker doing day trading would catch someone's attention, wouldn't it?"

Lisa nodded. "Yeah, but I wouldn't tank the economy. Hell, there aren't that many poor Thinkers in the world because they all do sort of the same thing. Every mutual fund management company in the world has at least one thinker. Harry has the right idea to begin with. Most wealth is generated by existing wealth—it's why the rich get richer and the poor never do. As long as I don't do anything to destabilize the markets, the Government thinkers won't come after me. Hell, some might copy me. Short term, though, I agree we take from the gangs to fund our own."

"I suppose I could start releasing songs again," Canary said.

The three stared at her, though after a moment Lisa nodded. "Actually, that might work. We'd have to do it Black Market, burn the CDs ourselves and sell them direct to keep the government from seizing your profits, but that would definitely earn some money. I've heard you sing, it's pretty good."

"I can always turn lead into gold," Harry said with a grin.

"You can do that?" Taylor asked, while Lisa had a coughing fit at the mere idea.

Harry shrugged sadly. "No. But it'd be cool if I could," he said. "Transfigured metal reverts to its original state quicker—metal conducts magic more than it holds it. That's why my staff has silver—it's the most magically conductive metal I had access to. But I could easily transfigure water into wine and sell that. By the barrel, really."

Taylor went to the sink, poured some tap water into a plastic cup and put it down in front of it. "Prove it."

Harry leaned over and waived his hands over the copy. "ABRA-CADABRA! Hocus, pocus! Show me all your breasts, and I'll be able to focus!"

Paige handed Taylor the pillow to throw, but before she could she saw the water was now the color of wine. Harry handed it not to her, but to Paige.

"That's wasn't a real spell, was it?" Taylor asked.

Harry chuckled. "No, but it's a true statement. I never lose focus when looking at a woman's breasts."

Paige sipped the wine cautiously. "A shiraz!" she declared, surprised.

"Yeah, I can do pretty much any type you want, red or white, sweet or dry. Can't do beer, fortified wines or hard liquor, something about the sugars makes it hard for transfiguration to last. Best thing about this spell, though, is that it's permanent. The Romans invented it because they _never_ drank water and it's been proven to last until consumed."

"It's good," Paige admitted. She handed it to Taylor, but the younger girl refused.

"I wouldn't know good from bad, I don't drink."

Lisa accepted it though, nodding. "Nice. So, we'll have to find a liquor company willing to accept wine from a non-licensed provider. Or, we set up a front company, get the license, and go legal. Something to think of later. Now, last thing on my list today. Coil. He has the power to create parallel universes, live through both to see which action produces the best result, and then collapse the universe he doesn't want."

Harry stared. "And you guys think my magic is bullshit. It makes sense, though. The Simurgh's song sounded like probabilities around him. Same thing, I suppose."

Canary frowned. "What Simurgh song?"

Lisa explained Harry's first known trait quickly before moving back to the subject at hand. "Do we try to frame him, expose him or kill him?"

"We free Dinah Alcott first," Harry said, not joking in the slightest. "Then? Some people are too dangerous to leave alive. Even if it wasn't about revenge for Marissa, even if he didn't set us up to go to the Birdcage, he was going to release an S-class threat on Brockton Bay. The man is just too dangerous."

"Take him alive if we can," Taylor said. "But if not…I agree. He's too dangerous."

"I don't know enough to vote," Canary said. "And…and…"

"You're a pacifist, I get it," Lisa said. "And we understand. I say again, we'll never ask you for more than you can give and still face yourself in the morning. So, I guess immediate priority is establishing a base and finding Dinah Alcott."

"Point me Dinah Alcott." A magic arrow formed over the coffee table, pointing northwest. "She's that way," Harry said helpfully. "When it comes time to find her, that won't be a problem."

"I'm sorry, but that is a more bullshit power than probabilities," Taylor said. "That's almost Tinker-level of bullshit."

"Bite your tongue!" Harry declared dramatically.

The two started arguing again.

Paige sighed and looked at Lisa. Lisa, though, was grinning at the two as if she'd just won the lottery.


	18. Metamorphosis 7

A/N: Chapter 17 review responses are in my forums like normal. Thanks for reading.

* * *

 **Metamorphosis 2.7**

Before dawn on their second day in the hotel, Harry was roused from a memory fugue by a knock on his door. "Yeah?"

The door opened and Taylor stepped in clad in running shorts and a sweatshirt. "I need a glamour before I go running."

 _Damn that girl has some legs._ Harry sat up a little in his bed. "Sure. Hey, I haven't had any exercise in a while myself. Mind if I come along?"

She glared at him, obviously displeased.

"Right, sorry. Never mind. I'll…"

"One stupid sex joke and I'm leaving you in the dust."

"Oh, okay. Sure." He cast the glamour to disguise her features. "I'll be ready in a few minutes if you'll wait."

Five minutes later he stepped out of his room to find Taylor waiting, and the two left the Bayview Suites for a jog around the Boardwalk. Ten minutes after that, he was puffing to keep up, knowing full-well that Taylor would not wait for him. Finally, after five miles, she slowed down at a high-end café.

"Okay," Harry gasped. "I admit it. You're in better shape than I am."

"That was awful, I should have done that faster," she said, dismissing him utterly. "It's been too long since I've run."

If he could have caught his breath, Harry was sure he'd have a snappy comeback that was not a sex joke, thank you very much. Instead, he stumbled along after Taylor as she went in to the café and ordered two wildly overpriced coffees with silly Italian-wannabe labels for Lisa and Paige, and then a cup of black English morning tea.

"Thanks," he said, making the very reasonable assumption, being English, that the tea was for him. "Are you getting anything?"

"I didn't get you anything."

"Oh, sorry. Um, could I get a tea too? Same as yours, black as pitch, no cream or sugar."

"Fine." She didn't bite the word out, though, so Harry considered it a blessing. She handed over some of Lisa's purloined cash to pay for it all when the Simurgh started singing in the back of Harry's head of shadows and people screaming.

Without even thinking about it, he stepped to Taylor's side and started whispering urgently to her: "Remember you're glamoured. Your name is Daphne, and you have no idea who the two girls about to walk in are."

Taylor glanced his way in confusion in the process of slipping the receipt into her pocket, only to freeze like a deer in the headlights when Sophie Hess burst into the café accompanied by the ringing of the door-bell and Emma Barnes' slightly shrill laughter.

Before Sophia or Emma could notice Taylor's deer-in-the-headlights expression, Harry jumped toward them. "Hey! I know you! Aren't you famous or something?"

He started snapping his fingers as Sophia and Emma both stared at him as if he were insane. "I know, I know…Day! You're Felicia Day, aren't you! God I love _Red: Werewolf Hunter_! That was the best freaking movie I've ever seen."

Beside him, Taylor broke her frozen expression by turning to stare at him as if he were insane. "First, that movie sucked ass. The fact that I even know it exists embarrasses me. The fact that you know it doesn't surprise me at all. Second, not every red-head you see is Felicia Day."

Harry made a point of pouting. "They should be! The world would be a better place if it had more Felicia Days. I'm going to marry her someday, you just watch."

Taylor rolled her eyes before turning to regard two girls she hated more than anyone else. She forced a smile. "Please forgive my brother. He's an idiot."

"And blind too, looks like," Emma said with an upturned nose.

"Hey, Daph, are you sure she isn't Felicia Day and just pretending so no one asks for her autograph?"

"Oh God, let's just go. I can't take you out anywhere!"

She clutched the to-go tray of drinks and pastries in one hand and pulled him out of Sophia and Emma's way with the other.

"Sorry," she said again to the girls as she pulled him out of the store.

They continued down the boardwalk at a leisurely pace amid the sparse early-morning foot traffic until they reached a narrow break in the store fronts that led to the back alley. Taylor ducked into it, forcing Harry to follow. Once out of side of the boardwalk, she calmly handed Harry the food and drinks, and then punched the back of a boutique bathing suit store.

"Fuck," she whispered harshly. "Fuck fuck fuck!" Now her hand hurt.

She stiffened when Harry put an arm around her shoulder.

"I was twelve when a villain named Marko kidnapped me," he said softly. "First night I tried to run away, he dribbled acid over my back. If he'd walked through that door, I would have pissed my pants, magic or not."

"How'd you know?" Taylor asked. She didn't jerk away from him, but neither did she relax.

He let go and took a step back. "I told you, I detect capes. Hess's song sounds like shadows and men screaming."

Taylor frowned. "How does shadow have sound?"

Harry shrugged. "The fuck should I know? It's all in my head anyway. With Simurgh fucking with my head, I'm lucky that eggs don't taste like plaid."

She shook her head, but a moment later chuckled. "You saved our asses back there."

"Eh, you bought me tea. We're good. Ready to head back?"

"Yeah."

They reached the boardwalk again, but almost immediately Taylor stiffened. "Shit," she whispered. "Don't look back. They're both following us."

"How can you tell?"

"I tagged them both with fleas from the service dog that was in the café," Taylor said.

"Damned, smart," Harry muttered. "Are you sure they're following?"

"They stopped outside a store a few fronts back until they saw us come out of the alley, then they started up again."

"Sophia doesn't strike me as a dog person," Harry said.

"Oh, she bitches about her neighbor's dogs all the time to Emma," Taylor admitted. "Prefers cats. What does that have to do with anything?"

"Well, I've got an idea to distract them, then. Next alley, I'm going to lean over and pretend there's a dog there."

"Why?"

"Because there will be. Lots and lots of them, in fact."

They reached the next break in the store fronts and Harry leaned over and held out a hand, as if encouraging a shy dog. Taylor stood behind him, holding their drinks and pastries, and watched as all the trash in the dumpster that dominated the alley suddenly turned into dogs.

Not just any dogs, Chihuahuas.

"The most irritating little rat-dogs in the world," Harry said with a satisfied, evil little laugh.

Taylor could only gape as more and more dogs appeared, dozens upon dozens, hundreds even. Harry suddenly stood and backed away, hands held up as in horror. "HOLY…WATCH OUT!"

With his shout of warning, three hundred seemingly rabid Chihuahuas stormed out of the alley. They ran all around Taylor and Harry's feet without touching them, and then made a bee-line right at Emma and Sophia. The two girls froze mid-step and stared in horror at the veritable horde of yapping, trembling, frothing-at-the-mouth little rat-dogs charging down at them like the Rodent Light Brigade from hell.

Harry cupped his hands to his mouth.

"Watch out!" he called helpfully. "I think they may have rabies!"

The two girls turned and ran with the dogs yapping at their heals the entire way.

"You know, that's almost as good as siccing bugs on them," Taylor admitted.

Harry shrugged. "Wouldn't go that far. So, how many fleas did you give them?"

"Oh, a few hundred. Each."

"You know what, Taylor? You can be cool when you try hard enough."

"You can be too, when you're not being a complete perv."

"Come on, let's head back. Our tea's probably getting cold."

They started back. "Harry?"

"Yeah?"

"We're not mentioning this again."

"Duh, 'course not."

~~Simurgh's Son~~

~~Simurgh's Son~~

On their fourth day, Lisa announced the successful establishment of a trading account. "Only made $15,000 after fees today, but it's a start," she said.

Taylor just shook her head. "That's a quarter my dad's annual salary."

Harry grunted without looking up from his poster board. He was almost done with the first quarter of the design. He'd carefully drawn a perfect quarter circle and had filled the entire space with the various rune schemes. Canary sat beside him, sheets of his loose-leaf notes in her hand.

"So what's that part do?" she asked, pointing.

"Plumbing," Harry said without looking up from his work. "Conjures and banishes water from the bathrooms. Lower left outside ring establishes ten apartments in the back of the warehouse on the upper level and another ten on the lower level—wanted to allow for future growth and storage. Each room will have its own bathroom."

"You know," Lisa said from her computer. "We could just hire contractors and have it done in a month or two."

Harry shrugged. "Maybe. But when I'm done, it'll be the strongest structure outside the Birdcage in North America. And it'll be invisible to our enemies."

Taylor drifted over to look at his work. At her gesture, Canary handed over the sheets. It took Taylor a minute to find what part he was working at, but after another minute she pointed to a spot he'd already finished.

"You reversed those two symbols."

Harry sat up, blinked at her with a frown, before taking the notes and comparing. "Well, shit. Thanks." He waved a hand and both symbols disappeared. He carefully redrew them with his sketching pencil in the right order. "There, done. If you're willing to compare this with my notes, that'd be great."

"Are you sure your notes are right to begin with?"

"As sure as I can be," Harry said. "I'm kind of copying something in my memories. It's the best I can do without a lifetime of practice and theory in runes. It's weird, I have the memories of the knowledge, but I'm still actually learning the knowledge myself."

Taylor shrugged. "Makes sense, I guess. I have memories of my mom teaching lit, but I don't claim to have her knowledge of it. Here, hand that over and I'll double check. Is it okay if I use a red pen to mark any mistakes?"

"What? Oh, sure. I can always vanish the ink after it's done." With that, he pulled another poster board out, measured the quarter circle, drew a label outside the circle in an open corner, and started working.

A day later, he and Taylor made their way by bus and on foot to the warehouse, since his teleportation didn't make her any happier than Lisa. He was itching to get started, but tried to convince himself the forced pace of their transportation would get him in the right mind-set.

They walked in through the very hole Harry made during his rune testing when they finally reached the abandoned warehouse.

"Do we actually need this much space?" Taylor asked.

Harry shrugged. "I figured it'd be better to have more space than less. I could set up a witch's garden, and you could have a spot for your bugs. In my memories, once the wardstone is charged it sinks down to the bedrock and makes a…basement, I guess you'd call it. You could use the basement for your bugs. Speaking of…"

"Perimeter's secure."

He sighed in relief. "Okay. Hold on a sec."

He reached into his backpack, which fit comfortably over one shoulder, and removed his five-foot long staff. By now, Taylor didn't even blink at his impromptu bag of holding. He put the backpack down, waved his staff and declared: " _Centrum._ "

Lines of white magic flashed across the building before forming a two meter diameter circle in the center of the floor. Harry stepped to the circle and touched the edge with his staff again. The white flared into a brilliant phosphorous shade before fading to reveal a perfectly formed circle burned into the floor, perfectly quartered by a cross in the center.

"Well, this is frankly the sucky part," Harry said. "Might as well get comfortable."

The sofa he'd put in there before was gone, along with all his other things. So he pulled a plush chair out of his back pack for Taylor, along with a small ice chest already filled with food and sodas. There wouldn't be any television, but Lisa had purchased them all a data plan and tablets, so at least she could read or play games while he worked.

Instead, though, she sat cross-legged outside the perimeter of the circle while he cast a cushioning charm and laid down on his stomach floating an inch or two off the ground. He pulled the poster board out of his back pack until he found the one labeled Southeast. He lined the circle on the board up with the circle burned into the floor.

He pulled the last of his implements out of his bag—heavy goggles and….

"A soldering iron?" Taylor asked.

"Yeah, the runes are too small for me to trace with my fingers. I have ten in there, I hope that's enough."

After protecting his eyes, he cast the etching charm on the iron, which he'd cut the plug off of. The metal tip of the precision soldering iron took on a white glow. He then began precisely tracing the runes on the board, burning through the thin sheet of paper to the floor below. It only took a second or so to do the first symbol, but each board had a thousand or more symbols on it.

Taylor reached for her tablet, recognizing a long day ahead of her when she saw it. They paused for lunch, but by dinner Harry had the first quarter of the design etched into the floor.

"Awesome," he breathed.

They came back early the next morning, and Harry once again set himself floating above the circle as he worked. They were well into the second session when Harry interrupted Taylor's reading.

"So, tell me about your dad."

"Why?" Taylor didn't sound upset, just curious.

Harry could shrug in his position of laying flat on his stomach, floating two inches off the board on a cushioning charm. "Don't have one. I can't remember anything about my life before the Simurgh—she took all that away. So, I guess I'm just curious what dads are like."

Taylor regarding him suspiciously for a moment before shrugging.

"He handles hiring at the Dockworker's Association," Taylor said. "It used to be a really powerful position before protestors sank a bunch of ships in the harbor and basically killed shipping in Brockton Bay. Not that there was a lot to begin with, after Leviathan."

"What's he like then?"

"He's…"

He could hear her song stutter. Harry wanted very much to look at her, to see what emotions were flittering across her otherwise blank face, but he didn't dare look away from his work.

"He tries really hard," she finally said.

"He didn't know you triggered?"

"No. He didn't know about any of this. They wouldn't even let me talk to him during the trial." She snorted. "What trial it was. Two hours, late at night, no jury. The judge said the Parahuman Act doesn't account for age, only power. Never mind I am freaking fifteen years old."

"You seem older," Harry said.

He could almost hear her frown. "What do you mean?"

"You're more mature than fifteen. Just sayin'."

"I turn sixteen in a few months. What about you? These memories of yours. You've said they belong to someone named Harry Potter. Where'd he learn about magic?"

"A school in Scotland, believe it or not," Harry told her. "Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. It had its bullies too, and its teen-age drama. Also had trolls, basilisks and ghosts."

Harry talked about Harry Potter's adventures in Hogwarts as he worked. More amazingly was how much faster the day went. He blinked in surprise when he realized that he'd transferred all the runes onto the floor for that quarter, and it was getting dark outside.

He sat up stiffly and stretched his back before looking at Taylor. "Hey, I have an idea."

"What?"

"Let's suit up and go check on your dad."

She stared at him blankly for a moment. "I don't have…"

"Lisa made me pack our costumes, just in case we needed to use our powers," Harry said with a shrug. "I'll turn and not look when you change, promise."

"Why would you want to do that for me?"

Harry shrugged. "I don't like being alone. You kept me company, and made the day go by faster. I owe you. Besides, he's your dad. He deserves to know you're okay."

"They'll probably be watching him."

"Let them. I know you hate it, but I can teleport us out if we get in trouble."

He liked how her hair got in her face—she had strong features for a girl, but her hair was all feminine. "Fine. Get my costume and then turn around."

He did as asked. He laid his own costume on the ground and did a switching charm on them.

"Ready," Taylor said behind him. He turned and saw her in her spider-silk costume. She'd created what looked like plates of armor along her chest, lower abdomen, shoulders, thighs and shins.

"Hey, quick question. That night Bakuda attacked you, I tried a bone-mending charm that your suit absorbed. It's why we had to take it off. You want me to try it on one of your armor patches, see what it does?"

She considered it for a second, her face hidden behind a patently creepy insect mask. "Try my shin plate first."

Harry nodded, leaned down and cast the spell. As he thought would happen, the thousands of little shells she'd woven into the silk melted into a single chitinous plate. He punched it as hard as he could.

"What'd you think?"

Taylor stared down at it before she walked to the nearest wall and slammed her shin against a steel girder. "Damn, this thing is better than a padded shin plate," she admitted. "Okay, do the rest, please."

He did as requested, and soon instead of thick collections of thousands of small snail shells her costume was lined with dark gray, solid plates that Harry suspected were capable of withstanding bullets.

"That silk is organic," he finally said. "It'll hold magic really well. I think maybe, if you want, you should make another costume and let me see about charming it. So, you ready to go see your dad? It's not even six, know where he'll be?"

"The office," Taylor said. She sounded sad.

Harry grinned behind his own mask. "Say, we've all been unmasked, right? How 'bout making an entrance?"

"What do you mean?"

"I mean we fly right up to his office and just walk in as we are. By the time the PRT get there, we'll be gone. But is there a point in hiding your relationship when they've already unmasked you?"

She considered it for a moment before shaking her head. "No, guess not."

Harry summoned his staff, packed all their things back into the backpack before throwing it on. "So, no bus for us in costume. Care for a ride, my lady?"

She climbed on behind him, gripping his mid-section tightly as they lifted off the ground and flew through one of the many rents in the wall.

The Dockworkers Association building had an office near the defunct north Ferry. "We've been spotted," Taylor said as they approached.

"Well, two costumed villains flying on a magic staff was bound to attract attention," Harry said over his shoulder. "What floor?"

"The Placement Office takes up half the first floor. Lights are still on, so others are probably working too."

Harry grinned. "Good, an audience. Hey Taylor?"

"Yeah?"

He turned to look at her over his shoulder, though his face was hidden behind his mask. "You're not a fifteen-year-old girl. You're fucking Skitter. You are a cape. You are powerful. And if anyone fucks with you, you take them down hard."

"Are you trying to give me a motivational speech?"

"Yeah? Thought it was better than a sex joke, but I can do those…"

"No, it's fine."

They alit on the sidewalk right in front of the steel and glass doors of the association building. To Harry's alarm, several of the dockworkers had seen them despite the late hour and were rushing toward them. He saw more than a few crowbars among them.

The air between them burst into life as thousands of insects swarmed onto the sidewalk. The running men skidded to a halt, but as Harry watched the insects backed up to form a flying, crawling swarm slightly behind Skitter.

"Hello, Kurt," she said from behind her mask to one of the men in the group. "How's Lacey?"

Kurt, a large, burley man with a thick red beard, took a step forward with a confused expression. "Taylor?"

"Skitter now," she said. "Supposedly I'm a villain. Better be careful or I might do something villain-y."

The glass doors opened and Danny Hebert rushed outside accompanied by two other men and three women, all in professional clothes made frumpy by a long day. Harry could instantly see the resemblance—Taylor's father had the same long-boned lankiness Taylor did, and he could see where she got her strong cheeks. But where she projected strength, Danny Hebert looked like a man so thoroughly defeated he could barely move.

Above her head, Taylor's insects began buzzing, while the sidewalk around them started squirming with agitated insects.

"Hello, Dad."

The confirmation that this masked Villain was Danny Hebert's daughter sent many of the Dockworkers a twittering almost like the bugs.

"Taylor! Are you…?"

"It's Skitter now, Dad," Taylor said. "When they unmasked me, they took my civilian name away."

"Why didn't you tell me?" he asked.

"What would you do?" Taylor asked. "The day a cape gains their power—triggers—is the worst day of their life. You couldn't do anything about them—Emma's dad was a lawyer, the other girl who made me trigger was a fucking Ward."

"Then…then why are you here?"

She walked steadily toward him, and Harry's estimation of the man went up when he didn't back away. "Because you'll always be my dad," Taylor said.

Harry knew she had to be torn up inside, but he couldn't help but admire the strength with which she spoke to her father.

"Because you tried your best after mom died. Because you deserve to know that that trial was a pack of lies—the man who testified against us was the actual villain who did it all. And because I love you." With that, she wrapped the startled man in a hug, costume or not.

All around, insects started buzzing and skittering about in a constant drone. Finally, she stepped back.

"I'm okay," she told him. "I may be a villain, but I'm not evil. I don't deal drugs. I don't hurt people. Our group, Coven, is going to try and help people as much as we can."

And wasn't that just the best intro Harry could have asked for! Harry slammed his staff onto the surface of the sidewalk, producing a brief flame to get everyone's attention.

"We are Coven," he said. "Technically, we're villains. But you are Skitter's people. We're not going to mess with you. No protection rackets, no drugs, none of that shit. But if E88 or the Merchants or anyone else messes with the Dockworkers, we will fight for you. Otherwise, it'll be like we aren't even here."

"You're the one they said raped and killed that girl, and forced her to kill her friend," burly Kurt said.

"Yeah, funny thing about that," Harry said. "My former guardian, the man who testified against me, is Assistant Director Thomas Calvert of the PRT. He's also the Villain Coil, a cape. He had a baby Endbringer in his basement—a Nilbog-level threat. He was going to let her out to destroy the city so he'd look good after. My girlfriend destroyed that threat on her own, and he shot her in the head for it and made it look like I did it."

Someone must have called the PRT, because Harry could hear sirens coming closer. He had no doubt the Protectorate would be coming soon. He was about to tell Taylor that very thing when two young heroes appeared out of the sky. The first wore rust-colored red with a full helmet of the same color, save for a silver panel. His chest had shield symbol—Aegis.

The second hero arrived on an honest-to-God hoverboard sporting a red and gold costume and a helmet that had lightening symbols at the ear. He carried a Buck-Rogers style laser gun. This would be their Tinker, then. Kid Win. Just seconds later a white van came screeching up to the building as the rest of the Wards of Brockton Bay came spilling out.

Harry recognized Gallant from his gun-metal power suit. Vista he knew just because she was the shortest member. In fact, he thought she looked rather cute with a white skirt covered in green squiggly lines over lime-green armor panels and her helmet.

Finally came Shadow Stalker, black body armor, black cape and black cowl, with an old-fashioned cross-bow in hand.

Harry grinned behind his mask. _Perfect._

"Hey Skitter, look! It's that psychotic bitch that tortured you in her civilian identity at Winslow until she actually forced you into triggering. You know, the one that's secretly working for Coil and who tried to murder Grue two months ago with that oh-so-not-a-tranquilizer bolt? The one who shot Bitch in the head and murdered her fucking dogs too?"

Harry's voice carried over the entire area.

"Oh, what do you know," Taylor said in an utterly flat tone. "Remember what we talked about, Mage? About just teleporting out if there's trouble? Let's not. I'm feeling pretty tense."

"I could…"

"No, Mage. It's a 'let's make war, not love' sort of feeling."

Harry grinned before looking at the startled, obviously uncomfortable Wards. He couldn't help but notice how they seemed to be separating themselves from Shadow Stalker. In his best Malcolm McDowell voice, he said:

"Right then. Time for a 'bit of the ole' hyper-violence!"


	19. Metamorphosis 8

A/N: Review responses for last chapter are in my forums like normal. And with this chapter...anyone who's ever read worm knew it was coming...yes, a PHO section. Albeit a brief on.

* * *

 **Metamorphosis 2.8**

The Wards stood in two unnerved groups—Shadow Stalker, and the rest. Harry and Skitter moved side by side, while Danny Hebert and the rest of the dock workers backed slowly away from the impending battle.

"Oh, before we get started," Harry said casually, "I'd like to say two things. First, Vista, your costume is adorable. It's actually better in real life than the pictures."

"Er, thank you?" Vista even sounded cute, and a little pissed off about being cute.

"Second, Skitter, do you want me to just turn Shadow Stalker into a Chihuahua and get it over with?"

"That was you? You fucking son of a bitch!" Shadow Stalker screamed.

"Ground rules," Skitter declared, speaking to Harry but loud enough every could hear. "Non-lethal, no turning Wards into animals. Shadow Stalker's already a bitch; she doesn't need your magic to be more of one."

"This doesn't have to end in a fight," Aegis said, stepping forward in his role as leader. "Your kill order has been rescinded. Even the Birdcage order has been held up in a higher court. If you surrender, there's a chance we can work this out."

"You have a murdering psychopath on your side," Harry said. "There was a black fucking crossbow bolt in Rachel Lindt's forehead when I found her body. Fuck, Shadow Stalker even shot her damned dogs. You think we're going to trust you when you have a fucking murderer on your team?"

He then disapparated to the top of the PRT van and lashed out a stunner that dropped Clockblocker instantly.

Shadow Stalker went amorphous about the same time a terrifying swarm blackened the evening sky and fell on the Wards like a Biblical plague.

"You know, she's on my side and that still scares the hell out of me."

Vista screamed and stumbled away, having not seen him teleport behind her. The space between them suddenly stretched out to ludicrous proportions. Harry spun and disapparated away just as one of Kid Win's lasers scorched the sidewalk where he stood.

Harry reappeared on the other side of the van, pointed his staff and cast his magic at the van itself. Suddenly an allosaurus roared its anger to the sky.

"Holy fuck!"

Harry had no idea who it was who screamed, but he was sure it was Aegis the van-sized reptile seized in its jaws.

"Hey, Wards, Aegis is your regenerator, right?"

"Why?" Gallant asked.

"Just don't want Lucy here chewing up the wrong guy," Harry said.

Suddenly he felt an overwhelming sense of shame and regret that hit him with actual kinetic force, making him stumble as the wash of emotions threatened to overcome any sense of self-preservation. Gallant must have hit him with his odd empathy beam. He answered with the most overpowered cheering charm he could muster.

Gallant's eyes were visible behind his mask, ballooning out as he must have sensed or realized what was coming. He didn't have time to avoid it, though, and collapsed in a heap laughing hysterically.

The main bout, though, was Skitter and Shadow Stalker. Every time the bow hunter went ghost, Skitter deluged her with insects that left her unable to do anything until she reformed, at which point Skitter laid into her with a baton. It was obvious that Shadow Stalker was the better fighter, but Skitter fought both dirty and…well, with a crap-ton of bugs to do her dirty work.

"Who am I forgetting about?" Harry asked.

His answer came in the form of a laser bolt that packed enough of a kinetic punch that it sent him tumbling. He rolled back to his feet as Kid Win flew at him on his hoverboard.

"Hey, Coven's recruiting," Harry called. "Want to come join the dark side? We need more guys, and we have beer!"

"I'm too young for beer!"

"Bah, you prudish Americans."

Kid Win fired another laser, and then in a flash of distorted space was instantly behind Harry, as if he'd teleported. His laser hit Harry between the shoulder blades and knocked him down. He landed in a roll and came up with his staff blazing.

Kid Win was already somewhere else. _Vista._ Harry pointed in her general direction and then cast the spell that made Potter a beloved name in thousands of households of little girls and boys.

Stuffed animals shot from his staff like bullets—unicorns, dragons, teddy bears and hippogriffs flew right toward the startled, confused Vista, and then bowled her unsteady small frame over in a mass of stuffed, conjured cuteness. With Kid Win now limited to his own power, Harry transfigured the pavement of the parking lot where they fought into a giant hand that reached up suddenly and captured the startled Tinker Ward.

Skitter and Shadow Stalker were _still fighting._ In fact, it looked like both had taken their punches but showed no sign of giving up. Big Lucy was still chewing on Aegis, who was oddly silent despite being lovingly gnawed on by an allosaurus. Clockblocker was still stunned and Gallant still sat on his as laughing as if he'd overdosed on a chemical distillation of _My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic_ , the one show that seemed common in Earth Aleph and Bet.

Under the pile of stuffed animals, he heard a cry. He casually walked over, leaving a wide girth around Skitter's frankly terrifying swarms, until he reached the pile. "Vista, you hurt?"

"I think I broke my leg!" came the cry.

Harry vanished some of the stuffed animals and then winced; it wasn't a trick. "Holy shit, girl, how'd you do that? I was hitting you with bloody stuffed animals!"

"I tripped when I tried to expand out," she admitted. "Wait, you stay away you son of a bitch! You're a villain!"

"Yes. The big bad villain who shoots stuffed animals at his enemies. Does your mom know you talk like that?"

"Fuck you and your mom too!"

"Wow. Guess she does. Still, stuffed animals. Not like I was hitting you with bone-breakers or anything."

"I was an accident. And besides, you made that dinosaur to kill us!"

"Posh. It's chewing on Aegis. Look at him, he looks bored. And dinosaurs are cool, right?"

"Maybe." She sniffed. "But you hurt Clockblocker!"

"Sleeping. He'll wake up in half an hour. Look, heroes and villains have truces all the time, right? I'll make a truce, five minutes only. After that you can go all Ward-y on my ass. In the meantime, I'll heal that break before it gets infected. Sound good?"

She stared through her visor. "You're a healer too?"

"Nah, I'm a wizard, I just happen to know some healing spells." He shrugged and removed his mask. "Ya bloody-well know who I am anyway, right? I really, really hate seeing kids in pain. So, I promise a truce to heal you. No strings attached, promise."

"It does hurt," she admitted. She was a tough kid. Too tough, really.

Harry pulled off his glove and stepped closer. "Compound fractures are nothing to mess around with. Yeah, I know Panacea can make it all better with a touch, but who knows when she'll have a chance, right? So, let's get this done now."

He gently touched her ankle, four inches below the nasty compound fracture, and poured healing magic in it. Vista went perfectly still as the magic healed the break. He then handed her a stuffed unicorn, pumping more magic in it. "This one will last a while," he said softly. "Consider it an apology for you getting hurt."

"I hate stuffed animals. They're for kids."

"Really? I know for a fact Tattletale still has one somewhere. Hey, you're actually one of the senior Wards, aren't you?"

"Yeah."

"It's shit to have kids fighting, Vista. It's not right. I know you're strong, and you have power, but you shouldn't be here. You should be out with your family, living your life. If things ever get bad, or you need help the Wards can't give, you come find us. We call our group Coven, and we're about the nicest villains you're ever gonna see."

"You're still villains," she declared.

"Yep, which is why I'm breaking our truce." He winked at her before sending a mild stunner through the hand still touching her ankle.

He stood up in time to see Shadow Stalker go down and stay there, with Skitter hovering over her threateningly. Best yet, he saw some of the Dockworkers cheering Skitter on.

Harry walked over to where Lucy continued to gnaw on Aegis. "So, you okay up there?"

"Oh, I'm just having a ball," came Aegis' sarcastic reply.

Harry grinned as he slipped his mask on. "So, Vista and Clockblocker are sleeping, should be up in half an hour. Kid Win is well in hand."

"Fuck you!" Kid Win screamed from the grip of the giant hand that held him secure.

"Gallant is stoned on a cheering charm. Have some hankies ready, when he comes down he's going to be a mess. Skitter has thoroughly beaten the shit out of Shadow Stalker." Harry's grin faded. "Seriously, that girl is a psychotic bitch, and I know for a fact she worked for Coil. Next time we see her, we won't hold back. Even if it means the Birdcage, we will put that rabid dog down if your corrupt, incompetent bosses don't do something about her first."

Taylor walked casually up to the allosaurus. "She has lice, ticks, flees and tapeworms now," Skitter said.

Harry recoiled. "Bah, that's disgusting. Well deserved, but disgusting. You ready to…oh, wait a second."

Harry left Skitter by Lucy and Aegis and ran toward the Dockworkers, who were kindly checking on the fallen Wards.

"Hey, guys, almost forgot!"

He put down his backpack and pulled out a five-gallon water dispenser tank from a bag that should have only been able to hold twenty pounds of books. The container was filled with transfigured wine.

"Free wine sample, feel free to share it amongst yourselves," Harry said as he rolled it to one of the startled workers. "Gangs have to peddle wares, you know? So, instead of drugs or prostitutes, we're peddling high quality wine at rock-bottom prices. Two hundred bucks will buy you five gallons of wine. That's like 25 bottles of wine, folks. Plus we recycle! If you like it, let Mr. Hebert know. He knows people on the inside of Coven, after all."

"That Cape, Shadow Stalker?" Kurt, Taylor's dad's friend said. "What'd she do to Taylor?"

"Well, you know, there's a secret about capes the Protectorate doesn't like folks to know. You don't get powers on a good day. No, usually what triggers powers are the worst, most god-awful day you can imagine. Days where you wish you died, and hate the fact you didn't. I understand Taylor had to go to the hospital a few months back."

"I remember," Kurt said.

Harry pointed at the prone form of Shadow Stalker. "She's the one that put her there. She and Emma Barnes. I'd be careful, though, she is a murderer. We'll handle her if the Protectorate doesn't, promise. And even worse than a murderer? Emma Barnes's dad is a lawyer."

Skitter joined him and oddly enough held a gloved hand out for Kurt. "Thanks for taking care of my dad. You and Lacey both."

"Danny's done a lot for us," Kurt said. "Least we can do. We'll try this wine of yours, and let you know."

"Thanks!" Harry said.

Skitter, meanwhile, walked to her dad and said something only they could hear before giving him a hug.

"We're done here," she said to Harry. "Let's head back."

"Right-o." They climbed onto his staff and lifted into the air. Skitter waived at the assembled dockworkers before they flew away.

"That was fun," Taylor declared. "But I'm very, very sore. Pretty sure I have some broken ribs."

"I can heal you," Harry offered.

"I'll think about it," came the response.

"I do shoulder rubs and all..."

"Don't push it, Bailey."

~~Simurgh's Son~~

~~Simurgh's Son~~

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Topic: A New Thread

In: Boards ► Events►America

Bagrat (Original Poster) (Veteran Member) (The Guy in the Know)

Posted On Apr 20th 2011:

See video **here**. Wards ENE, the Entire Team, taken out in five minutes by Mage and Skitter. I have no words. Someone help me understand what the hell I just saw.

EDIT: Board rules say I'm supposed to actually contribute something if I'm starting a thread, so here's what I do know. Feel free to fill in the blanks.

April 11: Lung Captured by Armsmaster, severely injured on verge of death suffering insect bites and anaphylactic shock. Armsmaster subjected to inquiry.

April 14: Undersides rob a bank. First sighting of Skitter. Get away handily.

April 15: Bomb tinker Bakuda goes on bombing spree. First appearance of Mage. Simultaneously, Coil and several other capes are murdered. According to trial testimony, Mage masters a cape named Sundancer and forces her to kill her best friend, then Mage shoots her and Coil in the head. At the same time, intervenes in costume against Bakuda and somehow kills Bakuda and almost the entire ABB gang with Bakuda's bombs. Grue and Regent of the Undersiders killed in battle, Bitch later found dead. All attributed to Mage, Skitter, or Tattletale of the Undersiders.

April 15: Mage, Skitter and Tattletale captured by PRT and held bound, gagged and unconscious (for Mage).

April 15-16: Rushed evening, weekend trial. Main testimony and video evidence given by Assistant Director Thomas Calvert, who was Mage's guardian IRL. All three sentenced to the Birdcage to be carried out immediately.

April 17: While in transit, the three escape. Also free Paige McAbee (Canary). See thread for Canary **here**.

April 20: Skitter and Mage appear at the Dockworker's Association building where Skitter meets her dad for the first time since her capture. Skitter and Mage state they were framed, state AD Calvert _IS_ Coil, then handily defeat the entire Wards ENE team. Accuse Shadow Stalker of murder, but also of torturing Skitter until she triggered. Dockworkers believe the villains and tie up the Wards until police arrive. Plus, a dinosaur.

Someone please tell me what the fuck actually happened?

 **xxvoidcowboyxx**

Replied on April 21, 2011

Know for fact Skitter was tortured in school. Had to be hospitalized for two weeks in January. I know who tortured her too. If what she said was true, then we know at least one Ward was at Winslow High.

 **Robby**

Replied on April 21, 2011

Keep it to yourself, cowboy. Revealing a cape's civilian ID is a federal offense.

The whole thing stinks. Canary made a mistake. It was a bad mistake, but she wasn't a villain and no way in hell did she deserve the Birdcage.

 **Chrome**

Replied on April 21, 2011

Why the hell is no one talking about the fucking dinosaur chewing on Aegis? A FUCKING DINOSAUR. CHEWING. ON. AEGIS. WHAT THE EVERLOVING FUCK?

 **Robby**

Replied on April 21, 2011

Powers come in all shapes and sized. Miss Militia can fucking materialize a ground-to-air shoulder launched missile system. Dinosaurs are cool, sure, but it's still just a power. More important is motivation. Why fight the Wards if they're innocent?

 **Vista (certified cape) (Wards ENE)**

Replied on April 21, 2011

They didn't fight us. Mage took us out so that Skitter could fight Shadow Stalker one-on-one. They said some scary things about what's going on in the PRT. I broke my leg, compound fracture. Mage took off his mask, promised a truce, and then healed me. Then he knocked me out, the bastard. But Panacea said he did a good job healing me.

 **Bagrat (Veteran Member)(The Guy in the Know)**

Replied on April 21, 2011

Glad to hear you're okay, Vista. So, Skitter and Shadow Stalker grudge match. Lends credence to the rumors. So Mage can heal? He can change things, what'd you say his classification is?

 **Vista (certified cape) (Wards ENE)**

Replied on April 21, 2011

Mover, Striker, Brute, possibly master. Maybe even a Trump. He teleported around, shot some type projectile that put Clockblocker to sleep for an hour, changed our van to an allosaurus that chewed on Aegis for thirty minutes before changing back, hit Gallant with a shot of super-charged happy that knocked him on his butt for the day, buried me in four hundred stuffed animals, healed a compound fracture, and then flew away with Skitter on his magic staff. Calls himself a wizard.

 **xxvoidcowboyxx (Brockton Bay)**

Replied on April 21, 2011

Like Myrddin?

 **Vista (certified cape) (Wards ENE)**

Replied on April 21, 2011

Maybe, don't know. He took us all out, but an hour later we were walking around just fine, all except Shadow Stalker. Skitter did a number on her.

 **Robby**

Replied on April 21, 2011

Do you believe what he's saying? About everything?

 **Vista (certified cape) (Wards ENE)**

Replied on April 21, 2011

Not allowed to say. [logged off]

 **AllSeeingEye(ICU)**

Replied on April 21, 2011

Information compiled by eye-witness testimony, villain and cape alike.

April 15—

6:30 EST Coil supposedly killed by Mage per testimony of AD Thomas Calvert, who was investigating Coil (supposedly). Also supposedly killed Sundancer's own best friend, Noelle Meinhardt. **Who just happened to be locked behind a subterranean vault designed to contain S-Level threats. In Coil's base.**

6:45 EST Bakuda begins attack, targets Undersiders directly, blames Skitter for Lung's capture, not Armsmaster. (See Armsmaster Inquiry here. Multiple insect bites and anaphylactic shock for Lung).

6: 52 EST Mage appears as Bakuda captures and begins torturing Undersiders. Strikes at Bakuda. _Did not realize attack would ignite bombs._ Able to save Skitter, Tattletale. Fails to save Grue or Regent. Visibly sick at this failure. First outing as a cape.

7:02—AD Thomas Calvert signs in to PRT ENE Headquarters. By car, Coil's base location as indicated in testimony is 30 minutes away from PRT ENE Headquarters.

7:25 EST Mage discovers body of Rachel Lindt in old Undersiders lair with two of Coil's mercenaries. (Note Coil supposedly died almost an hour prior). Insects were supposedly found inside Bitch's body, but she was killed by a sharp projectile that was not a bullet—like a crossbow bolt.

7:30 EST—Mage, Skitter and Tattletale captured by Dragon, the most famous Tinker in the world. Tattletale and Mage both subjected to Master 10 protocols and kept unconscious and gagged. Neither allowed any word in their defense during trial. Skitter held bound, not allowed to see her father in any capacity. Skitter is 15. Mage is 16. Tattletale is 17.

April 16: NH Superior Court Justice Donald Stiggard sentences all three minors to the Birdcage without possibility of parole or appeal. Donald Stiggard is a former PRT veteran who served with Calvert prior to Ellisberg and, two years prior this date was robbed by Tattletale. He is also a shareholder in Fortress Construction, of which Thomas Calvert is a board member. The trial is held at night, on the weekend, behind closed doors.

April 17: All four escape.

You tell me if Skitter and Mage are lying about Coil being Thomas Calvert? (Judge Stiggard is now under investigation by the New Hampshire Judicial Ethics Committee and DOJ).

End of Page. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 … 138, 139, 140, 141

 **Private message from AllSeeingEye:**

 **AllSeeingEye:** We're going to have plenty of room.

 **Antigone:** They're watching me. Special needs. Not easy. On constant lockdown. He never leaves the base. Can't get to her at all.

 **AllSeeingEye** : You know where?

 **Antigone:** Yeah. Things are bad here. Everyone else buys it, or doesn't care.

 **AllSeeingEye:** If you could get to surface, would you come?

…

 **Antigone:** Got nothing else.

 **AllSeeingEye:** Get to any bus stop and text us. We'll get you.


	20. Metamorphosis 9

A/N: As always (except, you know, when _not_ ), previous chapter review responses are in my forums. Thanks for reading.

* * *

 **Metamorphosis 2.9**

Wearing radical glamours that changed not just minor features, but hair and skin color and their heights, Harry, Taylor, Lisa and Paige packed up all their things from the Bayview Inn just as the sun rose and climbed into the used primer-gray Suburban Canary and Lisa purchased while Harry and Taylor were finishing up the ward stone at their evil warehouse of villainy.

Paige, being the only one who actually had a driver's license, did the honors of driving despite Harry's assertion that he could do it. He was roundly vetoed by the others.

Regardless of who drove, having transportation reduced an hour-long trip on the buses to less than twenty minutes. Being Paige's first visit to the warehouse, she was less than impressed. "Are you sure we can't rent another week at the Bayview?" she asked Lisa.

"Oh, ye of little faith," Harry said from the back seat. "Trust me, this is going to knock your socks off when we're done."

"Can't be better than a dinosaur," Taylor said from beside him.

"That will be hard to top," Harry admitted.

Paige parked in a filthy alley between their warehouse and the next. They climbed out and stepped through the familiar hole that Harry made during his rune testing. The whole warehouse remained empty as they made their way to the intricately wrought circle of runes in the center of the structure.

"So, do we need to wait outside while you do this?" Lisa asked.

"No, don't think so," Harry said. "Just stay a few feet back from the circle and you should be fine." He pulled his staff from his backpack and stepped to the exact center on the circle before he sat down cross-legged. "So, I've never actually done this before. I don't think anything'll kill me, but if it goes well I might be a little loopy afterward."

"How will we tell?" Taylor asked.

He was beginning to understand how effective a flat delivery of a zinger could be. Taylor shot ego-seeking missiles all the time.

"Har har," Harry muttered. "Okay, show time."

He closed his eyes, opened his mind, and whispered to himself: _Okay, Harry Potter, show me what you have._

The words came flowing from his mouth faster than he could have possibly spoken himself. He felt the core of his magic explode as the words and his will shaped it into a funnel that shot straight down out of his body and into the complex rune scheme underneath him.

"Oh shit," Lisa whispered as the runes underneath Harry started to take on a white glow. She took a step back, and both Paige and Skitter joined her in her caution.

Abruptly the cement around him cracked, and Harry plus the circle he sat on sank out of sight. All three women jumped in alarm at the loud, gun-shot like crack of severing concrete. After he was out of sight, they cautiously crept forward again until they could see into the hole the circle left.

Far below, they saw a brilliant circle of stone illuminated by thousands of the tiny runes Harry spent the past week working on. Harry remained unmoved on the stone, his staff held upright in front of him.

"It's burning away mud and water too," Lisa whispered.

Indeed, Taylor could see the walls of the tube the stone's descent formed. They appeared to be as much mud and water as anything else. Somehow, though the tube glistened with moisture, it remained in place.

"It really is magic, isn't it?" Paige breathed.

"I have no other explanation," Lisa admitted. "Unless he's like Eidolon, his power set is too diverse."

Finally, perhaps thirty feet down, he came to a stop. They could barely hear his chanting but the glow from the stone appeared even brighter than before. Blue-white light blossomed around him, vaporizing water and mud and forcing it in a super-heated plume that pushed the ladies to stand back as if it were a geyser.

"Oh, that's not going to alert anyone," Tattletale muttered as they stared at the plume of steam billowing through one of the larger holes in the roof.

After just a minute, the billowing stopped. They risked another look and saw that the magical stone now illuminated the bedrock under the warehouse, and rising from it the hundreds of piles that supported the foundation of the structure. All the mud and water was gone somehow. Scintillating fingers of light, almost like arteries, reached out from the ward stone to every pile and rose up right toward the foundation.

The floor under their feet began to glow with that same blue-white light. It spread out under their feet, making their shoes warm but not hot, until it reached the outer walls. It then started climbing up those as well.

Taylor's bugs were the first to inform her what was happening since she didn't see it at first. She sensed through them a sheet of cracked MDF suddenly become a smooth glass surface. With the brilliance of Harry's impossible power, they could see metal walls straitening and restoring themselves. They saw windows suddenly sprout glass and rusted steel girders straighten and shake off the rust until they gleamed in their original condition.

Still the glowing power rose until it reached the steel buttresses overhead, strengthening those and the aluminum sheets until the roof was once more fully intact. On the far side of the warehouse, the narrow elevated office projected out toward them, assuming greater dimensions until it formed a balcony lined in glass and steel walls. More important, another row of rooms grew up from the first like a budding amoeba, only on the scale of a building.

Tiny windows expanded into the size of bay windows; and railings two levels up ran all the way around the structure, literally unfolding before their eyes, until it came around front and bloomed into another office structure that looked over the front of the building from what Lisa guessed would be the third floor.

Light shifted from the many holes into the ceiling to the wide, inviting windows that lit the interior with brilliant Spring sunlight. The roof overhead closed completely and as they watched additional girders organically sprout from various corners, creating crossing lattices that strengthened not just the roof, but the whole structure.

"Okay, I admit it," Paige said. "This has blown my socks off." She turned but then gripped Lisa's arm. "Look!"

The hole in the center of the floor was gone!

"Harry?" Taylor called.

"Over here!" The three women turned to see Harry Bailey stumble tiredly up a flight of stairs that didn't exist just a moment ago. "Come on down, I need to tune you to the wards."

After the display they'd just seen, none of the three felt like scoffing. Instead they followed Harry down a flight of steps into a sublevel just as spacious and well-lit as the level above. To their shock they even saw more apartments right below the first set, two levels of them with a nearly identical balcony.

The sublevel walls were a brilliant white, and the light came from the ceiling above, which cast a brilliant white glow. This level did have a hole in the middle of the floor. Harry led them to the edge—the glowing heart stone sat just five feet below the lower surface in the bedrock.

"Okay, here's how the security works," Harry explained as they gathered around the hole. His words slurred a little with exhaustion. "Ordinarily with Mages I could just key the ward stone to your magic; obviously that's not going to work. So we're going to key it in the old fashioned way—your blood. This will allow you to come and go, remember where it is, and guide others to and from the base. No one who isn't keyed in will be able enter without one of you _willingly_ guiding them in. The wards are intent-based. If you're being compelled, they won't be able to come in."

He conjured a small silver knife. "I promise to heal the cuts after," he added.

Taylor accepted the knife and without hesitation cut vertically along the vein in her wrist and held it over the ward stone. She didn't even wince, though Lisa clucked her tongue. "Honey, that's not a safe place to cut."

After a good dribble Harry healed the cut with a wave of his hand. "Lisa, Paige, she actually had the right idea. It's magic, sacrifice is part of the deal. It's going to take more than a drop or too. But hey, I can cast a numbing charm if it helps."

Taylor glared. "And you didn't think to offer that to me?"

Harry flushed brilliantly. "I'm sorry, I just thought of it!"

"I'd like a numbing charm, please," Paige said worriedly.

Harry cast the charm, and but even then Paige couldn't do it. Taylor smiled with surprising gentleness, stepped to the older woman and took her arm.

"Just look away." She cut Paige's wrist as she had her own, and after a fair dribble Harry healed it.

"Yeah, pain and I aren't on good terms," Lisa said when her turn came. "Charm, please."

Lisa was able to cut her own wrist and have Harry heal it quickly. "So, that wasn't symbolic at all, was it? The three of us literally cutting our wrists and bleeding on an alter to our wizard. All we need now is some Black Sabbath music."

Harry shuddered. "Bah, bite your tongue." He then sank down to the floor in a heap before unfolding prostrate on his stomach. Taylor was closest and knelt down beside him.

"Are you hurt?"

"No," Harry said without moving. His face was planted on the cement. "Think I'll just lay here for a while. Tired."

"Any beds in here?"

"No. But I'm good. Really, I'm…" Whatever he was going to say next was lost in a snore. Taylor rolled him onto his back and his arm flopped boneless to the cement beside him. His staff rolled from his fingers, but then rolled right back on top of his hand and rested on his open palm.

"So, furniture and supplies?" Paige asked.

"Should be arriving in an hour," Lisa agreed. "Cable and internet too. The warehouse and all surrounding property was foreclosed on years ago. I bought it for pennies on the dollar under a shell corporation. Also have a generator system coming this evening. Tinker-tech, ten year guarantee, could power all of south Brockton Bay."

"Sounds expensive," Taylor noted.

"It is. We better start bringing in some money soon we we're going to have to eat nothing but Ramen."

Paige shrugged. "I like Ramen."

~~Simurgh's Son~~

~~Simurgh's Son~~

Harry woke with a start in a vast, empty white room. He felt stiff and sore from sleeping on a hard surface. It took a moment to remember where he was—the sublevel of their secret base of villainy. With a groan he lifted himself to his feet and looked back at the secondary set of apartments that he'd built in. They looked really nice, just like the Mage coastal resort he'd patterned the architecture after.

Rather than walk to the stairs Harry crossed the empty space to the southeast corner. As he approached, he noticed a slightly green-tinted panel in the wall. He placed his palm on it and the floor underneath shimmered and started to rise, while the ceiling overhead shimmered and disappeared.

He emerged onto the first level amidst lines of staring workers in various delivery uniforms. He checked, terrified for a moment, before assuring himself his glamours were still in place.

"Pretty cool freight elevator, huh?" he asked with a forced grin.

The workers shrugged and continued on their way with mattresses and other pieces of furniture toward the far set of apartments.

He saw Paige at the door, if he remembered the glamours right. In fact she appeared to be a tall black woman with high cheekbones and long legs. She was touching the confused workers and guiding them past the door. In the distance, Harry could see Lisa directing the traffic in the apartments.

"You're awake."

Harry jumped a little as Taylor appeared behind him. "You startled me! And you left me sleeping on the floor!"

Taylor shrugged, utterly unsympathetic. "You offered everyone else a numbing charm but me. Somehow, we both survived. Come on, I have a question for you."

She grabbed his hand and yanked him hard toward one of the three smaller side doors. The delivery people were using the huge freight door. They crossed by the alley where Harry got a brief glimpse of all the delivery trucks outside, before Taylor led him into another warehouse. It was just as dilapidated as their new one was before his wards. The only difference was this warehouse was literally alive with insects.

"I need a place for my bugs," she said. "I can either store them in the sublevel and give Paige nightmares every night, or I can do it here. I don't need it to look as good as what we have across the way, but I would like to keep it relatively safe."

"So a giant terrarium, built like a research center sorta?"

"That might work."

Harry thought about it for a minute. "Well, a lot of the work in our other ward stone was the architectural details. Apartments with plumbing, creating the wiring for electricity…"

"It did that?" Taylor interrupted.

"Well, yeah, I borrowed the plans for an ocean resort. Granted, the writing then was based on plasma conduits and relays, so I actually simplified it, but yeah. We plug Lisa's generator into the ports and the whole place will run fine. Even wired for cable and internet. But with this place…I…there was a really cool research station established on Caldos to study magical flora and fauna. I'll…I need to think about it, but I think I could do it, and it wouldn't be as much work."

Taylor nodded her head in appreciation. "Thank you." She started to turn away but hesitated. "Harry, about Grue and Alec?"

He tensed worriedly. "Yeah?"

"You tried, right?"

He hesitated a moment before nodding. "You were out. Bakuda was doing something to Grue but I didn't know what. All I know was that his leg kicked like he was in pain. I thought I had to act fast to save him, so I cast a mild blasting charm that was just supposed to knock her back away from you without doing any real damage. I summoned you to me because she was monologing with her back turned to me, that's why you and Lisa were right behind me. I…"

With a long, shuddering breath he continued. "I've played that night over in my head again and again, thinking what I could have done different. If I'd used a stunner, I don't think she would have blown up. But once she blew up, that shield of mine was the strongest I could make in the time I had. I screwed up, Taylor. I went in without knowing what was happening and I used the wrong charm, and Grue and Alec died for it. I'm sorry."

She studied him intently. Her glamour made her look like a thirty year old office-worker, but the intensity in her eyes was all Taylor. "You would have saved them if you could." She stated it as fact.

Harry could only nod. "I've been around killers half my life. I don't want to be like that."

"Okay. We're better head back."

~~Simugh's Son~~

~~Simugh's Son~~

They met on the balcony overlooking the now immaculately clean, white-walled interior of their mostly empty lair. Wide windows let in the late afternoon sun to give the interior almost a resort-style feeling accentuated by the table and porch chairs Lisa had ordered for their balcony. They met over a meal of Thai Food take out and transfigured Chardonnay (tea for Taylor).

"We're down to less than a quarter mil," Lisa announced after they finished. "Major expenditures are done for now, but if we ever want to expand we're going to need cash. Day trading will take care of the little things, but we need to establish a cash flow within the next few weeks."

"We're trending," Canary said. "I mean, the fight you guys had with the Wards. We're actually the most popular villains in the world right now, even ahead of Uber and Leet."

"Whoop," Taylor said dryly. "From what I've seen, city's in a shit-state. The people Bakuda forcibly recruited were not her enforcers, but just average citizens. So when Oni-Lee broke Lung out last night…"

"He broke out?" Harry asked. "How…never mind. Sorry, go ahead."

"…when Lung broke out, he came back to a weakened ABB fighting against the Merchants and E88 for territory. He's been hitting public E88 targets had and taking territory back. Looks like an all-out gang war."

"And Coil?"

Lisa tapped her pen against the table in a rapid rhythm.

"Gone to ground. From what I've been able to tell Calvert disappeared from the PRT about five minutes ahead of Armsmaster and a squad of PRT agents sent to detain him as part of their inquiry. Like he knew they were coming."

"Amazing," Harry said in a flat tone, unconsciously channeling Taylor. "So, we still need to rescue Dinah. I can't apparate in to a blind location, but we can probably infiltrate."

"He keeps a lot of cash on hand," Lisa noted. "Wouldn't hurt to make it a robbery in which we also happen to save an innocent girl. Also, we might possibly have an insider."

Harry sat up. "Jess?"

Lisa nodded. "She doesn't believe you killed Marissa for a second. She knew the nature of your relationship. But she's essentially trapped by Trickster and Ballistic. From what I understand, Ballistic buys the story and blames you."

Harry sagged back down. "That sucks. He helped test my runes. He's a good guy, he really is. I guess…he liked Marissa and Noelle too, I guess. Marissa said Noelle was their leader before she triggered and became a monster."

"I'm not sure we have the firepower to take out Coil's entire operation even with inside help, though. We may want to recruit some other help."

"Such as?" Taylor met Lisa's gaze over the table. "We can't count on heroes, and I'm pretty sure we're on New Wave's shit list after the whole bank fiasco."

Harry frowned. "What's this?"

"Panacea was in the bank we hit," Lisa admitted. "I had to do some fast talking to get out, and unfortunately Glory Girl was not amused."

Taylor snorted but chose not to add anything.

"Any-hoo," Lisa sang. "There are some other capes that we could recruit to help. Faultline's crew is for hire, and with Coil's trouble they might be willing to take a one-off contract against him. It would cost, though. We could also..."

Her phone buzzed. Harry still didn't have a fancy smartphone, but Lisa did. She pulled it from the pocket of her slacks and placed it on the table. "Holy fuck," she said.

"What?" Harry wasn't sure which of them asked first, he, Paige or Taylor.

"Come on, you're going to have to see this for yourselves." She stood from the table and ran toward the line of apartments behind them. The first was her own, a spacious room with a new queen-sized bed, a nicely furnished corner desk with three laptops up and running, and its own bathroom and closet. She reached one of the lap-tops and pulled up an email.

The TO: field was filled with hundreds of names, some Harry recognized as area and national news castors, the PRT, and media personalities all over the country. The opening line of the email made Harry's heart thud painfully in his chest:

 _The Following information was compiled by Harry Bailey, AKA Mage, who has, among others, the power to sense capes. Without his assistance the following information would not have been available._

The email was a list. At the very top of the list was Kaiser, the leader of the E88 with a large block of text next to his name and picture. The block of text included his civilian name, Max Anders, his profession, address, phone number, date of birth and the first appearances of his costumed identity in Brockton Bay. The email even included a picture of Kaiser next to Max Anders, comparing size and visible traits. At the end of that block was a zip file with more evidence.

Kaiser was just the first. Purity, Hookwolf and Krieg, and the rest of the members of Empire Eighty Eight were included in the list.

But it didn't stop there.

After the E88 list, the email listed the names and personal information of all the Wards themselves, beginning with Vista, aka Missy Biron, age 12, the orphaned daughter of Melissa and Arnold Biron of Brockton Bay.

"That son of a bitch," Harry breathed. "That son of a fucking bitch!"

"We're going to kill him," Taylor announced with a cold, furious anger. "We're going to kill him for this."

"If they don't kill us first," Lisa said. "Everyone's going to blame you, Harry. E88, the PRT, everyone."

"Of course, why wouldn't they?" Harry said darkly. "We're going to kill him anyway. I'm going to go suit up."

~~Simurgh's Son~~

~~Simurgh's Son~~

Legend winced at the hopelessness behind Harry Bailey's smile.

" _That I was a slave? That every one of my so-called guardians since I was twelve was a cape villain who used my cape sensitivity to find and recruit or kill capes? Marko, Colbert, Justinian? All cape villains. Know how much Calvert paid for me? Only $50,000. That's all my life was worth. You know that Thomas Calvert is Coil, right? That he shot Marissa and made it look like I did it? That we're innocent_?"

Around the table, Rebecca Costa-Brown sat stiffly, her expression blank. While she wore the costume of Alexandria—the strongest flying brute in the world—she had her helmet off. Eidolon, the strongest cape outside of Scion himself, sat slumped in his chair with a distracted, depressed expression on his heavy, unattractive face.

The two non-Triumvirate members at the table, however, looked interested.

"He has no _corona pollentia_ at all, much less a _gemma_ to control his power? We know this to be fact?" The woman who spoke was black, but not African-American. She had oddly Euro-centric features despite her skin color. Her accent was indecipherable, even by Alexandria with her powerful Thinker power.

"Both Panacea and our own extensive tests say no," Rebecca said. "We had him screened after London, and again after his capture more recently."

"So, he has power, but is not a cape," the Doctor said. It was the only name they had for her, though Legend did remember her silent companion once referring to her as Doctor Mother.

"What does your bogeyman say?" Legend asked, once his thoughts focused on the final person at the table.

The Doctor's primary enforcer looked young and attractive, with Mediterranean skin but Baltic features, if he were to guess. Striking and beautiful, Contessa had an ethnicity he could not quite place. She met his gaze but said nothing.

"Bailey is invisible to all pre-cogs and many thinkers," Doctor said. "Has been since the Simurgh attacked London. His companions, however, are not. Based on their place on the Path, we assign a value to Bailey. Short term we want them contained, not killed."

"Didn't work out well for us the first time," David said dryly. He flicked the mask he wore as Eidolon. As had been his habit, lately, he contributed little more than snide comments and sarcasm.

Legend tried not to frown. If people only knew the man behind Eidolon's mask, they might worship him a little less. It was not a charitable thought, but Legend wasn't feeling particularly charitable toward anyone at the table, himself included.

"The boy was innocent," he finally said. "From everything we've seen, Coil set him and his friends up. Why are they still listed as villains at all?"

The Doctor shrugged. "They have a part to play in the Path, but not yet. In the meantime, they have the potential to sow too much chaos and confusion. We need the situation contained."

"I can't agree to that," Legend said, taking a stand. "I'm sorry, but they've done nothing to justify imprisonment. The inquiry is proving more and more how terribly they were set up."

He could feel the young Contessa's eyes on him, but ignored her as he stared intently first at Doctor, them Rebecca. "I want them removed from the priority list. There are other ways to contain them than forcing them to become the monsters they were falsely accused of being. If that changes, I'll take them into custody myself."

"Is that Legend of the Triumvirate speaking?" Rebecca's clipped, cold voice belied her almost ephemeral beauty. "Or Eric the father?"

"He's sixteen, Rebecca. His life has been hell because _we_ failed him. Me. Personally. Unless he proves to truly be a criminal, we owe him a chance to live."

"A compromise," the Doctor said. "One I think even Alexandria could agree to. We need them contained, but it doesn't have to be in the Birdcage. If the opportunity arises, make them an offer they literally can't refuse…"

Legend listened and carefully schooled his expression. If compromise was the art of making sure everyone was equally unhappy, what she proposed was most definitely a masterpiece of compromise.


	21. Interlude: Loss

A/N: Chapter 20 Review Responses are in my forums as normal. A few notes on this-the story of Brian Laborne's trigger, and Aisha's after, are as far as I remember pretty close to canon. I detailed them far more, but as far as I can remember these events come from the story. Like my other interludes, and the canon Interlude's in Wildbow's story, this one is intended to set up the next arc and provide additional perspectives.

* * *

 **Interlude: Loss**

Brian Laborn closed his trig book with a tired sigh. He hated math. Things like literature and history came naturally, but he always struggled with math and the sciences. He still tried to maintain at least a B in biology and trig, but he had to work harder on them than any other subject.

Homework finished, he decided he deserved a break. He knew his dad expected him in the gym for at least three hours the next day, so the idea of doing any type of exercise repulsed him. Instead, he left his room and shambled into the kitchen of the old apartment he shared with his dad.

The kitchen had a half-eaten pizza from two days ago, a left over steak from last night and a tub of pulled pork from Smokey Don's by the gym. He pulled out the pork and some bread to make a sandwich. He grabbed a beer from the bottom drawer of the fridge (dad never cared as long as he had enough for himself) and settled down on their old, sagging couch to watch some television until his dad got home from the garage.

The news was all about the latest Endbringer attack. He switched it to sports.

Halfway through his sandwich and the first quarter of the Brockton Bay Bandit's first quarter, his phone giggled at him like devilish little girl. He sighed impatiently. "What is it now, ya little imp," he muttered.

On his phone he saw a text from his sister Aisha. _HELP ME._

Part of him wanted to laugh it off. Aisha sent him goofy texts all the time. But for some reason he didn't. He put down his beer, muted the TV, and called her back. The phone went straight to voice mail, like it was busy or off. Frowning, Brian called his mom's landline number.

He got a busy signal.

He tried texting her back, but she wouldn't respond.

 _Or couldn't._

For a moment it became hard to breathe and his whole body began to shake. With a sudden burst of energy Brian leaped out of the couch, pausing only long enough to grab his wallet before rushing out the door. He didn't even lock it, which would probably get his ass beaten, but he didn't care.

He burst out of the building and sprinted up Lord Street to downtown as if hell followed. He didn't just flag a cab, he jumped in one about to pull out and climbed in before the driver knew what happened. "Get me to 1821 Downey now!"

The driver didn't question. Grue might only have been fifteen, but he was already the larger of the two men in the cab, with more muscle than most adults. "Sure, sure!" the driver said.

They reached his mom's building, which was even more rundown than his dad's. He ran from the cab. "Hey, you fuck! What about my fare!" the driver shouted after him.

Brian didn't care. Every second that passed convinced him something terrible was happening, but he couldn't let his mind dwell on what. He rushed through the lobby and up the stairs—the elevators didn't always work and when they did they were too slow. He took the stairs two at a time, flying up like a cape until he reached his mom's floor.

He had a key of course, and in seconds was inside. He saw his sister in the far corner of the room, curled up like a ball with her forehead to her knees in the small space between the couch and the wall.

She looked up when he arrived, her cheeks wet with tears. Brian's breath caught again and he had this strange feeling in his stomach, almost like when his dad really landed a body blow in the ring. She reached for him from the floor, like she used to do when she was little. He rushed right to her and picked her up as if she still was.

She didn't scream or cry, she just held on to him tighter than he could ever remember her doing so before.

"What's wrong, Aisha? What happened?"

The silence broke and she started crying again into his shoulder, hugging him so tight he could barely move. He wasn't going to ask again; he'd never seen his bratty sister hurt like this. He started toward the door when a figure moved between them.

Brian never saw the guy before, and didn't like what he saw then. The man was young, his hair braided into rows with beads carrying them down to his shirt line. His didn't wear his shirt, but he had a Merchant tat on his left pec and a worn out pair of denim shorts hanging so low on his hips Brian could see pubic hair.

In his arms, Aisha made an almost rodent-like squeal and tried to move away from the man.

That feeling of being punched changed in Brian's stomach. The near-pain suddenly turned icy cold. The shaking in his arms stopped as he let Aisha slide into a bundle on the floor. The Merchant flunky knew violence when he saw it.

Neither of them said a word. The man went for a weapon in his back pocket—knife or gun Brian didn't know. Brian went straight for the man's face. His fist connected in a solid upper cup not even his dad could take issue with. The man screamed as he bit a piece of his own tongue off. He stumbled back, flinging a sling blade wildly onto the kitchen floor as he fell backward.

Brian followed—he stepped forward with his left hand, twisted his whole torso and swung a strong right cross right into the man's stomach. Even while stumbling backwards, the Merchant flunky folded in the middle from the blow, which is what kept him from cracking his skull on the edge of the counter.

Still Brian followed. Right hook, left. He could hear his dad critiquing him in the back of his mind. _Lift your shoulders, boy! What kind of pussy-assed punch is that? Use your body, damn it! Use your body!_

Brian used his body. He used his knee, ramming it into the bloody mess that was the man's face. He moved down the body, concentrating on soft tissue and the overwhelming need to hurt this man who somehow, in a way Brian could not allow himself to consider, hurt his sister. Finally, his fists bleeding and bloody, he pushed himself to his feet to look down on the broken, bloodied figure who made his sister cry.

A brief glance down the hall showed his mother, naked and only partially wrapped in sheets, visible on the edge of the bed. As he looked, he saw her move and sighed with both relief and disappointment. Then he felt shame at that last terrible feeling. The cold monster still had its hand wrapped around his heart, though, so the shame fled quickly. Without a word, he reached down to his sister and picked her up like a baby despite her being nearly twelve. She wrapped her legs around his waist and clung to him like one as well.

"He's never touching you again," Brian whispered.

The cab driver was still there on a phone when Brian emerged. He took one look at the blood all over Brian's hands, the girl his arms, and the three twenties held out between his two fingers, and said, "He's come back with the fare. Call you later, Sal."

Brian got back into the back seat and Aisha sat on his lap. The driver didn't even ask, perhaps realizing that Brian was still on that edge of violence. He turned the cab around and drove him right back to where he got him.

Before Brian climbed out, the man said, "You made the son of a bitch pay?"

The driver _knew_. Maybe not the details—not the hows and whys. But he knew exactly what just happened and why.

Brian looked down at his split knuckles, but also the blood that ran up past his wrist. "Yeah."

The driver handed one of the twenties back. "Good."

Brian took the cash, nodded to the driver, and then took his sister home.

~~Simurgh's Son~~

~~Simurgh's Son~~

When she was nearly fifteen years old, Aisha heard on the news that her brother was dead.

Mom was actually working for a change, pulling shifts at a diner downtown in a sketchy effort to make herself look good for the caseworker, Mrs. Henderson. Despite being a shitty, drug-addicted bitch of a mom, she didn't want her little girl being taken away by her own son.

Aisha didn't just want to live with Brian, she wanted her mom to as well. Brian was the strong one. He was the only one who cared. Dad couldn't be bothered with a girl, and washed his hands of mother when he caught her smoking crack and fucking her dealer in the alley behind the house.

After he finished beating the dealer to a pulp, he beat his wife as well, and then left. Douglas Laborn was a hard man, and Aisha felt no more for him than she did for any of the men in her mother's fucked up life.

She sat on the couch, unopened school books around her from the homework she couldn't do even if she wanted to, and watched the television. She liked the old Tom and Jerry cartoons—the constant, mad-cap violence and simple plots appealed to her. She had a hard time following anything for too long—even movies often lost her interest because she just couldn't make herself pay attention to the plot.

During commercials she flipped channels, and it was during that channel flipping that she saw the cape name Grue in a scrolling headline at the bottom of the screen.

She stopped and turned it up. The newscaster was some pretty Latino women with hair Aisha would kill for.

"…youngest capes ever sentenced to the Birdcage. Assistance Director Thomas Calvert had this to say:"

The screen switched to a forgettable man with receding hair and a sharp chin. "It's a tragedy any time a life is lost, either to violence or to incarceration. Unfortunately Harry Bailey demonstrated a level of ruthlessness and a horrifying power than we cannot risk being free. He directly murdered three people, one of whom was only seventeen, and was directly responsible for the death of several of the members of the gang called the Undersiders, including the parahumans called Grue, Regent and Hellhound, all of whom were themselves teenagers. We had…"

The words tumbled into a low drone in Aisha's mind. "Brian, what the fuck are you getting yourself into," she muttered. She started to pull out her phone to text him when the message sudden hit her like one of their dad's right hooks.

Grue was dead. Brian was Grue. Her brother was dead. Brian was dead.

 _He's never touching you again._

Words failed her and her brain shut down. She pulled her knees up onto the couch and let her forehead rest on them, and tried to remember what it felt like when he held her. She gave him such a hard time, all the time, but she knew for a fact that he was the only one who really, really cared. Her mum didn't care—she was trying because she just didn't want to lose. Her dad didn't care because she was a girl. Only Brian cared. Brian became a villain to get the money to give her a better home. Everything he did was for her, even if she fucked with him every chance she got.

Her brother was dead. The only person in the world who gave a shit about her—who really saw her—was dead.

She felt numb, inside and out—as if something inside her suddenly broke. She didn't say anything when her mother came into the kitchen.

"Aisha!" Mom screamed. She sounded angry, like she did if she went too long without hitting up. "Aisha, the fuck are you, girl? Where's dinner?"

Aisha looked up from where she sat on a couch ten feet in front of her mother. The older woman was looking right into the living room, before cursing and walking to Aisha's room. "Aisha! You better get your ass in that kitchen, girl! Aisha!"

"Mom, what the fuck? I'm right here!" Aisha said.

Her mom walked right by her, heading into her own room. Aisha jumped up, truly concerned now, and followed her into her bedroom. "Mom I'm standing right in front of you," she shouted. She reached out and touched her mom's shoulder.

Celia Laborn screamed and jumped up from where she sat on her bed. "What the…who's there?"

"MOM!" Aisha screamed.

Her mom blinked but wouldn't look at her. "Fuck it," the older woman muttered. She turned her back on Aisha, pulled her can from the bottom drawer of her nightstand, and removed a needle. Heroin, now, looked like. She switched it up sometimes, depending on what she could afford.

"Shit, mom," Aisha muttered. So much for going straight.

Anger and frustration boiled up until she reached down and ripped the needle from her mother's fingers before she could inject. Celia looked up, blinking without focusing, before staring down at her arm.

"Did I already shoot up?" she muttered. She put the can away, then stood and looked out into the apartment. "Aisha, where the fuck are you?" Now she sounded less angry, and a little worried.

That was when Aisha realized she had a power, now, and that the forums were right. Powers didn't make anything better at all.

~~Simurgh's Son~~

~~Simurgh's Son~~

Coil knew the moment he received the notice of Tattletale and the other's escape that his civilian identity was compromised. The unwritten rules only applied if honored by both sides—and he'd not even bothered to acknowledge them, much less honor them.

It took only a few split universes to know that every member of the Protectorate in Brockton Bay would be out for his blood within hours. Fortunately, with the help of his Pet he had contingencies in place to give the Protectorate other things to occupy their time.

Walking out the door of his home, he called Dimitri. "I need immediate pick up. Enact Contingency 34."

No hesitation. "Yes, Boss."

Coil disconnected. While frustrated at the set-back, he knew this would not be his end. No, this was just a momentary distraction.

~~Simurgh's Son~~

~~Simurgh's Son~~

Dennis's parents were yelling.

Missy Biron could hear them from the lounge where she sat in front of a television watching the news report listing all the names of the capes revealed in the email. Missy knew all the responsible news agencies were refraining from repeating the information on the Ward members, but there were a lot of less than reputable media sources that took an almost devilish delight in ruining the lives of the youngest heroes of Brockton Bay. Somehow it didn't surprise her that her cape name, Vista, was among the very first compromised.

At least Shadow Stalker was gone. Word had it she was transferred, but Missy overhead Dennis speaking to Dean about how she'd violated her probation and was back in juvie pending a possible sentence maybe even to the Birdcage.

"Hey Missy, how are you holding up?" Dean greeted her with a wave and sat down on the couch a few feet away. She knew he didn't need to ask—he could sense emotions. The fact he was there at all proved to her he'd sensed her black mood.

"Are they going to take Dennis home?" It was a trick she'd learned from the Youth Guard counselor—answer questions with more questions.

Dean shrugged. He was simply too nice to push—his cape name of Gallant was appropriate for him. "Probably. Wouldn't be surprised if we get stuck with a Youth Guard agent. The PRT will have to offer Family Protection to any of our families that feel at risk. They'll set up alternative identities for us too. Probably disguises or something like that. Are you worried?"

"No," Missy said. Why worry? She had no family left to be concerned with.

The door to the conference opened. "You haven't heard the last of this, Piggot, not by a long shot!"

Dennis' dad was looking a lot better, Missy noted absently. His hair had fallen out the previous year with the chemo, but after Dennis begged Panacea for help it had grown back. It was silver now, instead of Dennis's carrot-top, but it was growing in nice and full.

He stormed out of the dorms with Dennis's mother a step behind. She saw Missy and smiled sadly before jogging to join her husband.

A moment later Piggot stepped outside with her bitch-face on, heading for the door.

Missy stood, cleared her throat, and said, "He didn't do it, you know."

Piggot stopped and visibly arrested whatever she was going to say. Instead, the obese woman with the obnoxious bowl cut turned to stare at her with a blank expression. "What was that, Vista?"

"Mage. He didn't do it. It was AD Calvert. Mage might have known the others from Arcadia, but I'm not in high school yet. He couldn't know my real name, only Calvert could. He's just trying to blame Mage to make everyone hate him."

"At this point I'm not sure it will matter," Piggot said. "He's already been tried in the court of public opinion. Even if he didn't directly release the information, if he helped compile it he still committed a major felony that we can't ignore, no matter how much of an injustice he might have been subjected to previously."

With that, Piggot turned and walked out of the room.

Missy sat back down on the couch, arms crossed, and waited for the next set of parents to come and yell about their child's identity being released.

"Missy, do you like Mage?"

She jumped, having completely forgotten Dean was still there. "No," she said a little too fast. "It's just…if he really wanted us hurt, he could have hurt us. He didn't. He healed me."

With that, she left the lounge for her dorm room. For most of the others, the dorm rooms were where they stayed while on active duty, but when off duty they went back to their families. For Missy, it was the only home she'd known since she was ten years old.

Sitting on her bed was the stuffed unicorn. She was too old for stuffed animals, and given her actual seniority as a Ward she was very sensitive to the suggestion of being a little girl. Yet…she kept the stuffed unicorn that Mage made for her. She climbed onto her bed, hugged the stuffed toy to her chest, and stared into space with dry eyes while wishing it were her parents in that conference room, screaming at Piggot.

~~Simurgh's Son~~

~~Simurgh's Son~~

"Kayden?" Louise's voice sounded odd to Kayden Anders.

She looked up from the CAD layout for the Michaelson's home to where her assistant was looking over her shoulder wide-eyed with alarm. Kayden left her own desk and walked into the reception area of her small Interior Design firm. "What is…what's wrong?"

They kept a television in the reception area of Kayden's Interiors, mounted on the wall facing Louise's desk. It could sometimes be slow and it didn't hurt to give Louise something to do when there was no work. She followed her secretary's gaze to the television and froze. She felt as if Alexandria had just punched her in the gut.

On the television was a picture of her from her last Driver's License renewal next to a picture of her as Purity. The newscasters were talking about _her_ life. Not Purity, but her, Kayden Anders', life. "This can't be," she whispered.

"Kayden, they know everyone," Louise said. The poor woman's hands were shaking. Her husband was a former captain of the Empire who, like Purity herself, began to question the ideology espoused by Kaiser. "It's all online, too. Even Ward names were released. It was supposedly put together by that new cape, Mage."

"But this… _ASTER!_ "

The screen had switched to her loft, where Miss Militia, Assault and Battery were escorting PRT agents and woman in a pantsuit from the door with Kayden's daughter in their arms. She felt her power blooming around her even as agony ripped at her heart. They were taking her angel away from her? _They dare?_

"Go," Louisa said. "Go, I'll lock up."

With a grateful look at her friend she let the power come even in her work clothes, rushed out of the door of their small rented office and took to the air while ignoring the screams of all those around her. Doing so, she saw PRT vans closing on her office, but she didn't care about that. She soared over the city toward her home, but when she arrived it was too late. People scrambled away in terror, but again she didn't care. All she saw was police tape—the capes and police were already long gone, with her daughter in their arms.

With a scream of unadulterated rage, she lifted into the air and blasted the home across from hers into dust before launching herself into the sky once again.

~~Simurgh's Son~~

~~Simurgh's Son~~

Jess looked up when the door opened and Trickster walked in in full costume, complete with his goofy mask. She hadn't thought of him as Francis in months. "So, are you with us?" he asked.

There was a threat not so subtly implied in his tone and the set of his shoulders. Perhaps because of her own physical limitations, or perhaps because of her power, Jess had become very good at reading body language. What she saw in his body language was the threat of death. While her power itself was powerful, she was terribly vulnerable to anyone who knew her secret. Though the whole base espoused the official line that Mage mastered and then murdered Jess's best and only real friend, she and Tickster both know who pulled the trigger.

"Doesn't sound like I have much choice," she said with forced calm.

He nodded, his expression hidden by his mask but his suspicion of her motivations obvious in the shuffling of his feet. He accepted her word anyway. "Come on, then."

He turned and left, allowing the door to close behind him.

She shook her head angrily and rolled her wheelchair over to hit the automated door switch. By the time she reached the elevator leading up to the garage, she found ten of Coil's men gathered around Ballistic in his full costume and Trickster. Coil himself walked out of the door from the underground lair where they moved after Marissa…

Jess stopped her thought. Coil, like Trickster and Ballistic, was in full costume, the body suit so tight she could see his ribs and bulge, though she suspected and hoped he wore a cup. She caught just the hint of his eyes behind the fabric of his eyes.

"My dear, I'm pleased that you've decided to join us," he said.

"They're my team," she stated simply. The less said, the less chance of him detecting a lie. She wasn't a hundred percent sure of his power, but knew it was very hard to fool him.

"Indeed. Ladies, gentlemen, shall we?"

They loaded her into her old van with Trickster and Ballistic driving. Coil and his men piled into their own van, and soon the two vehicles were passing through traffic heading south toward Boston, and their appointed meeting with Accord.

Jess had personally never met the man, even in her Genesis form, but she knew it was because of Accord that their friend Cody was gone, either killed or sold away into slavery.

"I haven't slept in a couple of nights," she said casually as they approached the outskirts of the town. "Mind if I catch a few winks?"

"It's an hour drive," Trickster noted.

She set her customized wheelchair into a locked, reclining position and closed her eyes.

Almost immediately she began a lucid, full-color dream of her own body in the back of the van, with Trickster and Ballistic in the seats in front of her. Noel, Marissa, Oliver and Cody should have been there too, and would have been if Trickster hadn't been such a goddamned shitty leader.

Within this lucid dream, she built a billowing form of soft, almost foam-like tissue, whipcord muscles and cartilage, but almost no bones to speak off. She formed eyestalks so she could see, and ears so she could hear, then laid her dream body down along the side of the van's interior with one eye-stalk raised high enough to see the road.

She could tell almost as much by the sound of the regular bumps and the higher pitched thrum of the tires on grated cement as her vision that they'd reached Brockton Creek, which was more a lake than a creek that fed into the bay south of the city, opposite the Piscataqua in the north. Like everything else in Brockton Bay, the bridge was simply a road on piles set high enough over the water not to be swept away at high tide. The guard rails were low and in ill-repair, like the bridge itself. Like everything about Brockton Bay.

Their van had an elevated roof to accommodate Jess in her wheelchair. Luke had, on more than one occasion, commented on how top-heavy the van was on tight turns.

Within her lucid dream, Jess said, "I'm sorry, Luke."

Ballistic turned to look at who spoke, but she was already moving. A tentacle snapped forward and grabbed the wheel from Tickster, pulling hard to the right. She shot another tentacle backward, blowing the back doors off entirely. Just as the van struck the rail at sixty miles an hour, her dream body slapped its' tentacles onto her real body and suddenly billowed in the wind like a parachute.

She flew out from the van, her dream body and her sleeping self, as the van containing the last surviving friends she had in this world flipped over the rail and into the vast, algae-infested, polluted waters of Brockton Creek.

The hard landing jolted her awake with pain in her back, and her dream form faded. Far ahead, she saw Coil's van screech to a halt and armed men climb out. Despite her pain, Jess closed her eyes and forced herself back into her lucid dream. It took longer this time, but the monstrous form she choose reached down and lifted her limp body in its muscular arms before running across the four-lane bridge. Traffic had already stopped because of the wreck, but now the terrified drivers stopped because of the great dragon that ran across the road.

Cradling her own form in the arms of her lucid dream, Jess flexed her dream-wings and felt muscles bunch powerfully across her back. She dreamed of running clear off the edge of the bridge and letting the fetid wind catch the stretched skin of her wings. A powerful flap and she gained altitude; another and she went higher and higher until she banked to her left and started flying north again back to the city.

A part of her, even within her dream, knew she was losing every possession she had, but it was worth it to escape. Luke might have believed Trickster's increasingly silly lies, but Jess knew from his body language alone Trickster killed Marissa. He tried to convince them all that he did everything because of his love of Noelle. Jess knew now, though, that he used Noelle as an excuse to hold the group together. Without her, he had nothing but fear and threats.

That was never enough to work on Jess, and it never would be. She wasn't afraid of dying; she just wanted to die on her own terms. More importantly, she wanted to make sure that Marissa received the justice she deserved.


	22. Escalation 1

A/N: Chap 21 review responses are in my forums as normal.

* * *

 **Escalation 3.1**

Lisa spared no expense furnishing their individual apartments, at least for the four current members of Coven.

Taylor's room, like the others, had a comfortable queen bed set in a cherry wood storage frame that had bookshelves above her head and drawers below. She didn't have a lot to put into it, but it was nice to know the option was there. A nice corner desk of matching cherry wood held one of the remaining Tokahama laptops Harry purloined from the evidence room of the police department. A slick burnished nickel frame ergonomic chair made using the desk comfortable.

Through the door set next to her personal office was a bathroom, complete with a walk-in shower and a nice walk-in closet.

The wall underneath the window which looked out over the well-lit warehouse held a comfortable love seat in a metallic blue upholstery. Everything was new and nice, and nothing felt like it was hers, or her home.

She sat on the bed and stared out the window. From her bed she could see the bay and beyond. It was still light out, but it was getting dark. Somewhere out there, her Dad was at his office, wondering where he went wrong. Wondering why his Annette wasn't there to save him. Perhaps, Taylor thought to herself, a small part of him blamed Taylor for his wife's death. After all, Taylor called her while she was driving. In a way, she was the cause of the accident.

For some reason, thinking about the way Emma's father and mother lit up in smiles every time they saw their little girl when she and her former friend were younger made her think that children were supposed to make their parents happy. She tried, especially after mom died, but she realized now how badly she'd failed. Even before she triggered, it seemed all she brought her father was pain and misery.

"Taylor!"

She looked up from her bout of self-pity to see Lisa in the door, a worried look on her face. "Just saw a police bulletin. Purity was seen flying toward the Docks. She knows you're an associate of Mage. And half the city knows your father because of his work with the Dockworker's Association."

Her eyes widened a moment. "Dad." She peeled out her room screaming. "Harry!"

He stumbled from his room up the hall, already in costume but without his mask. "What?"

"I'm going to suit up too, but then you need to get me to the Dockworker's Association. Do that…damned teleportation, just hurry!"

She ran back to her room and got into her Skitter costume as fast as she could. Only minutes later she ran back into the hall to see Harry waiting this time with his mask on. Canary stood nearby, rubbing her arms worriedly. "Are you two going to be okay?"

Lisa must have filled her in.

"I'm sure it'll be fine," Harry said with his normal false-confidence.

He held out a hand to Skitter and beckoned her over. She had no idea how his teleportation worked, but she was willing to risk the pain. She rushed into him and a second later she felt her entire world ripped asunder as she instantly lost contact with all the insects she'd gathered in the abandoned warehouse next to theirs.

Everything spun violently around her and she fell to her knees, fighting not just to control the nausea but to regain some semblance of balance. She couldn't even stand up! Her power throbbed like a painful cut below her scalp; she had to swallow bile to keep from throwing up.

It was will alone that forced her eyes up just in time to see a white streak of light descend to a point fifty feet above the Dockworker's Association. _Purity. Oh shit, the PRT took her daughter!_

Two beams of hard light lashed out from the villain's hands, each forming a slight spiral in opposite directions almost like the double-helix of a DNA strand. Only this strand could kill. The light blasted away the front of the second floor of the building like a giant hand batting away webbing. People screamed within the building, scrambling for cover.

"No!" Taylor moaned. Stumbling desperately, she reached with her aching power and gathered every insect she could from the five blocks around the association. Every flying bug she could find she sent swarming at Purity.

Most never even got close—Purity blasted them out of the air before they got within five hundred feet of her. A few got closer to her, but a few wouldn't be anything more than an irritant to a mother after her baby.

"Where is MAGE?" Something about her power augmented her voice too, causing it to burst across the water. "Give me Mage now, or everyone in this city will die!"

Taylor turned to Harry, who shrugged.

"Go save your dad," he said. "Get him to the lair. He'll be safe there, if nothing else. Pretty sure Purity can't break through the wards. I'll distract her."

He hopped on his staff and shot into the air. Taylor, meanwhile, ran as fast as she'd ever run. People were tumbling out of the side of the building, and it did not surprise her a second to see her dad emerge helping an injured man covered in plaster, only to run back in to help someone else.

Overhead, the sky lit up like a fireworks display as Purity went after Mage. Taylor paused in her own efforts with a gasp of alarm when she saw one streak of light clip him and send him spiraling toward the water. He hit with a splash; almost instantly Purity struck the water with two powerful beams that sent steam billowing into the clear afternoon sky.

Mage, meantime, popped into existence on the side walk, soaking wet but otherwise fine.

The workers in the building were so disoriented, or in some cases hurt, that they didn't realize a cape was running in their midst until Taylor reached her dad. "Dad, we need to get you out of here!"

"I can't leave these people," he declared.

Taylor fought an urge to scream. "They're in danger because you're here! Purity knows you're my father, and she knows Mage is part of my team, that's why she attacked here! Come on!"

She grabbed his hand and pulled, but to her shock and confusion he pulled her instead. She was strong for a fifteen-year-old, but she was still a fifteen year old girl, while he was a grown man. She could have kicked his ass, but he'd always out-mass her. He stood now looking at her with that same stubborn expression he'd had on his face when he sued the school for the locker incident that sent her to the hospital, and secretly caused her to Trigger. It hadn't helped then, and Taylor was afraid of what it would do now.

"These are my people, Taylor," he said firmly, an oddly familiar tone of stubborn strength in his voice. "My friends. My family. Who's to say that villain won't continue to come after them even if I'm gone? If you have a safe place for me, then you have to have a safe place for them too. All or none, kiddo."

"Oh fuck me," she muttered. Her declaration was punctuated by Harry suddenly slamming into the concrete like a bullet, an audible "Oh shiiiiiiit!" accompanying his fall. Nor did Purity give him any time to recover, following up with beams of hard light that sent employees scrambling as it crushed the concrete around him into powder.

The air in front of him shimmered into a shield that held off the light long enough for him to roll and pop away.

Taylor hissed as her mind raced. "Okay, fine," she decided. "Come on, Coven's lair is by the pier closest to the Graveyard. It's too far to walk." She concentrated on her bugs—her fliers were mostly gone but she had plenty of crawlers. With concentration, she used their legs and mandibles in a way she'd not thought to use before.

They became a loudspeaker. "EVERYONE LISTEN! PURITY HAS TARGETED YOUR OFFICE INTENTIONALLY. YOUR ARE ALL IN DANGER. PLEASE EITHER GO HOME OR MAKE YOUR WAY TO THE PIER NEAREST THE GRAVEYARD AND YOU'LL FIND SHELTER."

People were sufficiently alarmed by the seemingly omnipresent voice to miss the first part. They heard the second, though, and people started scrambling toward their various cars.

"Danny, Taylor, ride with us!" That was Kurt, Taylor noticed.

She was tagging all the employees as they fled and sent her bugs into the building. With alarm, they told her there were at least two people buried under rubble on that second floor.

"Fuck," she muttered. "Dad, Kurt, two people are still up on the second floor, not moving."

"How do you know?" Kurt asked.

"My power. Come on!" She led the way back to the building with her father and his long-time friend a step behind. The first floor was covered in dust, with most of the old glass walls that separated Danny's office from the rest cracked or shattered. They ran up the stairs to the exposed second floor. Outside, Purity's beams were now lighting up a darkening sky as dusk fell upon them.

"Under that desk," Taylor pointed. "And that pile of rubble."

Danny went to the first spot, Kurt to the second. "It's Larry," Kurt called. "He's alive but in bad shape."

"Susan, she's breathing," Danny said. With a grunt of effort he managed to lift the plaster-covered woman named Susan bridal-style in his skinny arms. Taylor could see the strain on his face as he carried her toward the stairs. Kurt, twice her father's size, lifted the man named Larry over his shoulder in a fireman's carry and ran after. Taylor followed a second later.

They rushed out of the building right into a blazing, second sun that shone down on the cement in front of them.

"This is your fault," Purity shouted. Her face was impossible to see behind the brilliant white glare of light. "Let's see how you like having your heart ripped out of… _umph_."

A blast of red light, almost lost in Purity's white glow, sent her flying away toward the water. Mage walked tiredly into view. "That woman is persistent," he said.

"You didn't tell her any sex jokes, did you?" Taylor demanded.

"Hell no. Even I know not to do that with an angry mum. Get your dad out of here."

"I'm taking them all to the lair."

Harry snorted. "Not much of a secret lair if half the bleedin' city knows about it."

"They're my people," Taylor said.

"Yeah, yeah, get out of here, that bloody woman is coming back again. My eyes are watering just from that blasted light!"

He jumped forward, brandished his staff, and a semispherical shield appeared just in time to intercept a fresh attack. Taylor didn't wait to see how the fight went; she opened Kurt's car doors. She climbed in with the two injured in back while Danny climbed in front. Kurt gunned the car away, head for the main thoroughfare that would take them to the docks.

"So, you got an evil lair, huh?" Kurt asked. His hands were shaking, but he was forcing himself to try and be brave with laughter. "Does it have a bunch of half-naked ladies?"

"Only when we're changing," Taylor said in a flat tone. "We're all capes."

"Not that it'd matter," Kurt laughed. "Lacey'd just cover my eyes or slap me anyway. God damn, been in this city my whole life. Saw Marquis, saw the All Father. Remember when Lung showed up and handed the Protectorate their asses. Never came that close to dyin', though."

"You get used to it," Taylor muttered.

She felt a hand on hers and looked up to see her father turned so he could hold her gloved hand. "You shouldn't, kiddo," he whispered. A single tear traced its way through the plaster covering his cheeks. "You shouldn't ever get used to almost dying."

"I'm a villain, dad," she said. "Not because I'm a bad person, or evil, or greedy. But because the heroes are corrupt murderers and no one else gave a shit but my friends. And you know what? If any Endbringer comes I'm going to fight anyway, because that's what capes are expected to do. Almost dying is a part of my life now, for better or worse. Kurt, turn left here then drive to the edge of the pier. Where all those other cars are parked."

They drove up to find a crowd of thirty stunned, shell-shocked people covered in dust and plaster milling about in confusion in front of what appeared to them as a hole in the pier. Taylor made her way through the crowd until she reached the personnel entrance. The door handle felt warm through her glove but the door opened without issue.

"Tattletale, Canary! Masks on! Civilians, coming through!"

"WHAT?" came the screeched reply from Lisa.

Taylor ignored her and touched the nearest worker. "You can't come through unless I touch you. You see it now?"

The startled woman nodded and let Taylor guide her inside. One by one she guided them all inside until her dad brought up the year, Susan still in his trembling arms. His eyes widened in surprise when he saw the interior. "What is this place?"

"It's our evil lair," Taylor said as she let the door close behind her. "No monorail, I'm afraid, just apartments and room to expand as we need. According to Mage, the building could survive a nuke."

Tattletale was approaching them in her lavender costume and domino mask. "Honey, this wasn't a good call."

"It was the only call," Skitter countered. "Purity attacked my dad's office. These people were in danger, and I owed it to them to get them to safety."

"We don't have any food!" Lisa pointed out. "We don't…"

"Harry can take Purity," Taylor said. "She was hitting him with everything she had and he didn't even have a scratch on his costume. This won't be for long, only until we know she's not going to kill anyone."

"Um, miss," Kurt said in an oddly subdued tone Taylor had never heard before. He was talking to Lisa. "We have injured. Do you have any first aid kits?"

Lisa glared at Taylor before shaking her head. "I'll get the kits, but they're your responsibility, Skitter."

Taylor look over the hurt, frightened faces of the people her father worked most of his adult life with. Most she recognized, even if she couldn't remember all their names. "Yes, they are," she said simply.

~~Simurgh's Son~~

~~Simurgh's Son~~

Harry was not having a good night.

For one thing, Purity hit _hard._ He never understood the term _hard light_ until that evening, when he got a face full of it for the very first time. It packed just as much punch as Ballistic's most powerful hit, but with some of the radiation and heat of Sundancer's star. It was a double-whammy that made his runes flare briefly and sent him flying every time he got hit.

Second, Purity was _good_. She anticipated his movements with frightening accuracy, blasting him out of the air over and over again, or finding him within seconds of his apparating. He began to suspect she might have had a secondary Mage-seeking power or something.

Finally, Purity was _pissed._ She wasn't just screaming in rage, she was crying and ranting. He'd never seen such overwhelming, unbalanced rage in his short life. He'd seen homicidal; he'd seen suicidal. He'd never seen someone so powerful so utterly lost and enraged. He believed without a doubt that Purity would gladly have burned the world itself to a cinder to get her baby back.

And she blamed him.

 _Watch out…oooooh that stings._

He'd also discovered in the course of the twenty minutes it took to distract Purity and allow Taylor to get the people out that there was an upper limit to what his runes could do. His extremities _hurt_. No broken bones, but he was taking a serious beating. When overwhelmed, the Runes seemed to concentrate their protective magic around his torso and head. He suspected if he was subjected to enough punishment, the runes would contract even further to just his head. That means as strong as they were, they could be overwhelmed eventually.

He wasn't there yet, but…but…wait. Why'd she stop?

Harry paused mid-flight and watched as Purity's white light seemed to fade and she collapsed into the wreckage of the building. Terrified it was a trap but too curious to do anything smart about it, Harry drifted closer until he could hear her sobbing uncontrollably. Even closer and he caught his first clear glimpse of the woman whose real name was Kayden Anders.

She looked…normal. She looked like a perfectly normal 27-year-old woman in a very professional, dun-colored skirt and jacket over a white blouse. She was barefoot, but otherwise looked as if she'd just come from an office somewhere.

 _She probably has._

Drifting closer, Harry suddenly had a hard time seeing this heart-broken woman as anything other than a grieving mother. Granted, a homicidal, deadly mother who could fly and shoot killer fucking light beams from her hands, but still a grieving mother.

"I'm so going to regret this," he muttered as he drifted down to the shattered section of the building where she'd collapsed.

Closer, now, he could see that her hair was a tangled mess and lines of soot and dust covered her hands and face where she'd landed. In the distance he could hear sirens and had no doubt that the Protectorate was on the way.

"Were you at MedHall during Spring Break?" Harry asked.

She looked up, glaring, but did not attack. "What?"

"The email said I'd gathered all the information. Coil sent me to Medhall, and I did detect some capes there, but I don't remember you there. Were you?"

"I don't work at MedHall."

"Then how the hell could I have known anything about you?" Harry demanded. He landed and held his staff across his chest, prepared for a strike. "I didn't send that email. I was Coil's slave. He _bought_ me from my former owner in England, and he bought me to find capes. I'm sorry, but it's not my fault they took your daughter."

Her rage seemed to sputter back into despair. "It doesn't matter anymore," she whispered weakly. "Aster's gone. They took her from me."

" _Point me Aster Anders._ " His magic formed an arrow pointing west by north-west. "So, Aster's that way. I _might_ even be willing to help you get her. Hell, we might even be willing to give you a safe haven for you and your daughter. The thing that makes me hesitate, aside from the fact that you just attacked innocent people and tried to kill me, is that you're a fucking Nazi. I hate to tell you this, but everyone hates Nazis. I may be a villain, but I don't really want to be associated with E88. Kaiser's an asshole."

Despite her rage and loss, Purity actually snorted a little laugh. "Oh, you have no idea, the bastard's my ex-husband," she muttered.

Harry stepped closer, removed his mask, and sat down cross-legged across from her.

"Hi. My name's Harry. I'm sixteen, and I'm a mage. Magic and all that. I'm part of a group, and I think we could help you, but we're pretty firmly against killing anyone not named Coil, and we want to do more to protect people than hurt people. We don't deal in drugs, or prostitution, or any of that crap. And we don't tolerate racism. At least…" He paused. "I don't think so. _I_ don't. I actually haven't talked about with Canary or Tattletale, but I know Skitter wouldn't."

Purity wasn't glaring at him anymore; she was staring at him with a gaping jaw. "Are you trying to recruit me?"

"Er…" He stopped a second. "Hell, I'm not even sure. Coil kidnapped a little girl and we really want her back, and Lisa said we may need some help getting her safely. Maybe not a recruitment drive, but maybe reciprocal favors? We help you get your daughter and provide safe haven for a while; you help us save Dinah Alcott from Coil?"

"You don't have the right to tell me what to think," she said defensively.

"Maybe, but I reserve the right to ask you not to _say_ it. I have the right to ask you not to act on whatever twisted little racist thoughts go through your head if we form a truce. That's not too much to ask, is it?" Harry shrugged. "I mean, Tattletale, Canary and Skitter have all asked me not to say all the bad sex jokes that go through my head all the time, and even _I_ know not to act on the thoughts going through my head being the only guy around three really pretty but powerful girls. If I can refrain from asking to see a girl's boobs upon first meeting, surely you can refrain from condemning someone for being black, or Latino, or…or Klingon. Seems reasonable, don't you think?"

"You really ask to see girl's breasts all the time?"

"I'm pretty sure I asked Menja or Fenja to marry me when I toured Medhall over Spring Break. I offered her a foot rub in return. Then she said she had a twin and I almost fainted. I hit up Rune pretty hard too, she's kind of cute…"

"That was you." Purity shook her head but then squeezed the heels of her hand against her eyes. "I can't believe I'm even considering this."

"Well, consider fast, the PRT's coming," Harry said.

She glanced up, a glow beginning to form from her eyes and hair. "Forty-eight hours. You help me find my daughter, provide us shelter for 48 hours, and I will help you with Coil."

"And no killing of anyone not named Coil," Harry said.

The glow intensified, but Harry just met her brilliant gaze. Finally, she nodded. "Agreed."

"Okay. Loose the glow, please. I've been told my teleportation really sucks, but it'd be great not to have a big glowing arrow pointing right at our lair for all the Protectorate to see."

With a firm nod she let her power fade. He stood and offered her a hand, which she accepted after only a moment's hesitation. He was surprised to find she was not very tall at all, barely to his brows. "Okay, here we go."

With a surge of will and magic, they stood outside the warehouse. Harry waited for her to curse or fall or vomit, but she merely winced. "Unpleasant, but I've had worse."

"Huh, it made Tattletale and Skitter sick."

"A Thinker and a Master," Purity said, as if it were obvious. "The instant change of location possibly affects their powers, or possibly your method interferes specifically with their powers." She looked around the area, having stepped away from him. "Where is your lair?"

"Er, you can't see it unless I'm touching you. This way?" He offered a gloved hand.

"How would it work through your glove?"

Harry shrugged. "How the hell should I know? It's magic. Doesn't always have to make sense."

She took the proffered hand and then her eyes lit up as she saw the warehouse. They stepped through the door and immediately found themselves facing all the workers of the Dockworker's Association. "Oh, this isn't awkward at all," he muttered.

Then came Lisa to the rescue. Damn that girl was smart.

"Are you hurt?" she asked Purity. "You were close by when Purity attacked, right?"

It took the older woman a moment to grasp the situation before she nodded. "I was close, but I'm not hurt."

"So, is Purity gone?" Lisa spoke unusually loud.

"Yeah, I finally got it through her head I didn't do this," Harry said in the same fashion. "She's gone."

"Good." She turned and nodded to Skitter, who raised her voice.

"Ladies and gentlemen, you should be safe to go home, the threat is gone. Kurt, can you get Susan and Larry to a hospital?"

"Will do, T…er, Skitter."

Harry and Purity in her civilian guise stood aside and watched as the tired but mostly unharmed DWA employees shambled out of the lair toward their cars. Danny Hebert lingered behind, though, at Skitter's gesture. When the last person left, Lisa looked hard at Harry.

"So, are we going to have the Triumvirate on our heads when those people say where we are?"

Harry shrugged. "How could they? They can't see the building and they've already forgotten about where it was. Once they drive away, they'll remember we helped them, but they won't remember how or where. Like magic."

Lisa rolled her eyes before turning to glare at Purity. "So at what point did blowing up a building full of innocent people seem like a good way of getting your daughter back?"


	23. Escalation 2

A/N: Chap 22's review responses are in my forums like normal. And now onto our next chapter, where Glory Girl meets Skitter, Harry has an existential crises, resolves the crises by not caring, and then telling inappropriate jokes to inordinately powerful and competent people. Oh, harry.

* * *

 **Escalation 3.2**

Lisa's question rang in the air like a good, solid slap to the face.

"This is Purity?" Mr. Hebert asked, astonished and increasingly angry. He took a step toward the seemingly mousy woman. "You damn near killed my co-workers!"

"They took my daughter from me," Purity said, not wincing from his anger in the slightest. "What would you do for your daughter?"

"Not kill someone!"

"Then you are a better person than me."

Lisa snorted. "Oh, that's obvious. Idealistic, young, powerful. You became a Nazi-by-marriage, not by upbringing. Those are the worst kind, you know. It's not that you were brought up brain-washed, no, you chose to accept the belief system when you should have known better. Then you married into it, and only after did you wise up enough to know it was bullshit."

"Don't you…"

"SOOOOOoooo," Harry said loudly. "Here's the deal I promised to Purity in exchange for her not burning the city down. We help her get her daughter back and give them safe haven for 48 hours, and she helps us save Dinah from Coil. Oh, and she promised not to kill anyone who wasn't named Coil for that period. What do you think, Tattletale, Skitter?"

"You should have passed it by us first," Skitter said.

"Yep, sorry. Words just kind of blurted out. No sex jokes, though, promise!"

"No, it's a good deal," Lisa said. She met Purity's gaze. "But you can't stay after that. I'd love to have had you ten years ago, before Kaiser twisted your mind, but that virus is there now. You can't look at non-whites any more without judging them. Even if you never said or did anything about it, that judgment would be there festering. If you were a cop, you'd have a string of brutality complaints in your file. You'd be shooting young black men if they even looked at you wrong. We don't have to be enemies, Purity, but we can never truly be friends."

"I don't need friends," Purity declared. "I just need my daughter back."

"Then we have a deal. She's in a PRT safe house at 20th and Hollister."

Harry blinked. "How the hell… Damn it, I was going to use all my flashy magic to find her. That's just…cheating."

Lisa shrugged, a hint of a grin playing about her lips. "Don't need magic when you have PRT access codes. But I'm not done yet." She looked at Harry. "It's a trap. Armsmaster and New Wave have teamed up to capture Purity, and because of how public her attack was, they suspect we've come to this accord. The Protectorate has their own Thinkers and Precogs working overtime. Evidently Brandish doesn't like Purity for some odd reason and leaped at the chance to help take her down."

Purity's eyes took on a glow.

"Bet they aren't expecting a teleporter and a girl who can control bugs," Harry said. A second later he said, "Are they?"

"The Simurgh influence has blinded precogs with you," Tattletale said. "My own power doesn't work on you either. They're shaping their models around me, Skitter or Purity herself."

"So we'll call that a conditional yes." He turned to Purity. "So, how 'bout you go and distract them while Skitter and I get the baby. We'll send you a signal when we have her and you go back to the Dockworker's Association so I can fetch you back to the lair."

"You expect me to trust you with my only daughter?" Purity almost growled the words.

"If you want her back, yes, I do," Harry said, not wincing in the slightest. "You might be able to take on New Wave and win. But can you take them and Armsmaster on, win, and do so without damaging the property where your daughter is?"

The glow died.

"You're right," she admitted. "Very well, I agree."

"I'm not okay with this," Danny Hebert declared. "Taylor, you can't just go attacking heroes and cops!"

Taylor froze, her face caught in an expression almost of agony. Harry started to say something but Lisa shook her head emphatically at him, so he shut up.

Taylor turned to face her father. "Dad, I love you very much. I always will. But I can do this, and I will. I am a villain because they made me one. If…if that's too hard for you to accept, I'll understand. You can walk out that door and you won't see me again."

Mr. Hebert couldn't have looked more shocked if she'd kneed him in the crotch. Harry winced in sympathy at the man who obviously loved his daughter, even as he struggled to catch up to her life now.

Taylor turned and walked out the door of the lair. Purity followed her with a sniff of disdain at Taylor's dad. Harry rubbed the back of his head through the cowl of his uniform.

"Yeah, bye. Hopefully we'll be back soon." He turned and fled the patently uncomfortable scene.

Purity was already in the air and streaking away while Skitter stood in the shadows of the early evening gloom, stock still. He wanted very much to give her a hug, or pat her back. However, after his recent abuse he didn't want the elbow or the creepy-crawlies that would result. Ignoring him, she took a few steps toward her dilapidated warehouse and removed a small backpack he didn't even realize she'd been wearing.

Harry couldn't help but shudder as a surprisingly large swarm of insects flew from the warehouse into the backpack, and still more gathered all around her.

"Um, that's really gross," he said.

"Shut up." She didn't sound angry, just very tired.

"Yeah. Right. Okay. Ready?"

"Yes."

He climbed onto his staff and tried not to think about all the creepy-crawlies hovering just inches away as she sat behind him and wrapped her arms around his waist. Again he felt an urge to say something that would make it better, but he couldn't think of what those magic words would be.

He flew up into the sky. "So, any idea where 20th and Hollister is?"

He could feel her sigh as a puff of air against his cowl. Harry yelped when several bugs crawled on his hand forming an arrow straight to downtown. "Oh that's just wrong on so many levels," he whined.

"I could have them crawl other places."

"No, no, hand's good. Let's go."

They flew toward the series of old, crumbling buildings, the newest of which was built before the New York Endbringer attack. "Harry?" Taylor said after a few minutes of nothing but the wind blowing over their ears and masks.

"Yeah?"

"Thank you. I mean, for distracting Purity and helping save my dad."

"That's what friends are for, right? Helping each other out?"

"Yeah, I suppose so. Don't have many friends to choose from."

"Me neither," Harry agreed. "We got a good start, though. Cause I know you'd do the same for me."

"I would."

It didn't take a genius to know when Purity reached the target. All they had to do was follow the lightshow.

Harry didn't know a lot about the rest of New Wave beyond the fact that Glory Girl was ridiculously hot and Panacea was wildly paranoid. Evidently they had a lot of fliers, though, and a somewhat similar power set to Purity. The villainess had to move constantly while blasting away at two other capes who had similar hard light powers as herself, but also seemed to be able to generate force fields too.

"Shit," Skitter said, all in cape mode now. "That's Lady Photon and Laserdream. That means Manpower, Shielder, Flashbang and Brandish on the ground, _with_ Armsmaster. Probably Glory Girl too. They're good. Real good."

"So you're thinking direct confrontation is a no-go?"

"Six of the best heroes in the city against the two of us?"

"So…sneaky, then? Think you can find the baby with those bugs of yours?"

"Yeah."

"Okay, I'm going to turn us invisible. It'll feel a bit weird."

He tapped her with a disillusionment spell that made her shudder against him. He then did the same for himself before flying low to avoid the lightshow of the fighting capes. As they got closer, Taylor hissed. "Armed men, twenty at least. PRT troops. I don't…there she is! She's in the basement behind a couple of locked doors. Squirming and probably crying, needs a diaper change."

"Eww."

"Yeah, I know."

Harry was thinking furiously about ways to get in, but Skitter beat him to it. "There are a ton of bugs down there," she said. "I'm going to make some drones to try to distract the capes in the building. The basement has a window in the alley. If you can see in, think you can get the baby?"

"Yeah."

"Okay, take us down."

Still invisible, Harry drifted slowly toward the narrow alley that separated the three story brownstone from the next row of houses over. A particularly loud explosion lit of the sky over the street, followed a second later by a huge _boom_ that rattled the windows in all the buildings.

They dismounted by a small, partially sunken window that gave Harry just a glimpse of floor space.

"The baby is in a crib about ten feet forward, eight feet down," Skitter whispered. "Four uniforms and a cape, I think. A tiara—yeah. Glory Girl."

Harry tapped her on the shoulder. "What?"

"Drop a spider down her cleavage."

"That won't hurt her."

"Skitter, normal people are freaked out by bugs. Trust me, it'll distract her."

"Okay." She closed her eyes. A moment later they heard a loud scream, followed by a baby's wailing.

"Fuck I hate bugs!" Glory Girl spoke loud enough to be heard.

Suddenly Taylor tensed and moaned. "Shit, Panacea's there too. She's doing some sort of feedback on me, I can't control my bugs! Mage, distract them!"

"With what?"

"I don't know, just do something."

"I…Joseph and Mary! Wait, I have an idea. Stay here!"

Harry slipped his staff into one of his charmed pouches and then cast a glamour on himself of the one hero he knew better than any other. Skitter stared. "Legend?"

"The man makes women swoon," Harry assured her. He then stepped a few feet away and waved his hand. Skitter scrambled back as a part of the wall turned a brilliant red before disappearing.

He rushed in a second later.

The basement was crowded with several PRT soldiers in full tactical gear, Panacea in her robe and cowl, and Glory Girl in all her tiara glory. In their midst was a crib with a crying baby. Glory girl jumped to her feet, her face lighting up as if she'd just received a new car for her birthday.

 _Which, come to think of it, she probably did_ , Harry thought.

"Legend!" She was actually blushing. "What are you doing here?"

"Director Piggot asked me to help because of my familiarity with Mage," he declared in his perfect Legend accent. It's not like he'd been pretending to be Legend for years after his rescue. _Not at all_. "We think he's joined forces with Purity. She's his distraction. We need to evacuate the child now."

He started to move to the crib, but Panacea beat him to it. "If you're Legend, let me touch you."

"I'm sorry, young lady, but we don't have the…"

"It's Mage, Vicky," Panacea said with a smirk. "Legend got his left ear pierced last year."

"Really?" Harry blinked, reverting to his normal self. "He did not!"

Naturally Glory Girl flew right at him, and then right through him, and then through the wall behind where he stood. Aster screeched in alarm when she flew from Amy's arms into Harry's, since he was actually on the opposite side of the room from where his illusion stood moments before.

"Yeah, and for the record, I _did not_ send that damn email," he told her. He disapparated from the basement just as Vicky came flying back through the hole she'd made. "Damn it!" she and Panacea screamed almost at the same time.

Harry appeared just moments later next to a still invisible Skitter. "Ready to go?"

"That was good," she admitted.

"I aim to please." They climbed onto his staff and moments later were airborne. He cast a _sonorous_ on himself and shouted, "Purity, time to go!"

He then zoomed down the street heading back to their lair.

"Er, Harry," Taylor said as she gripped his waist hard enough to crack a rib. "Got a problem."

"What problem."

"Glory Girl's behind us."

"Well, shit," Harry agreed. "That's a problem."

Harry estimated he was flying close to two hundred miles an hour. The wind didn't whip at them; it _beat_ them like a hammer. He pushed everything he could into his staff while holding the baby in a fold of his robe.

"She's still gaining," Taylor shouted grimly over the wind.

Aster was howling. Any faster would be dangerous.

"Sic your bugs on her face," Harry suggested.

"What the hell do you think I've been doing? It's the only reason she hasn't caught us yet!"

"We're almost there."

"Just opening the door will give her time to get us," Skitter said.

"I could apparate us."

"Not that desperate yet."

He banked hard and dropped down toward their lair. Doing so let him glimpse Glory Girl flying _really_ fast toward them. "She looks pissed. You shouldn't have dropped that spider on her chest."

"Jerk!"

"Okay, I'm going to fly into bug city and slow down enough for you to hop off. I'll apparate Aster inside."

"Right."

He dove the staff into the old warehouse. Instantly he could hear millions of insects chittering. Glory Girl flew in a second behind, only for a huge mass of hundreds of pounds of insects to land on her back and send her crashing into the ground. Harry slowed enough for Skitter to jump off and roll, and a second later he disapparated.

He appeared in the air above the floor of their lair with a very upset baby. He flew right to the balcony. Canary stepped outside to meet him and accept the baby.

"Oh, the poor dear!" she said. "What'd you do to her?"

"Flew too fast," Harry said. He conjured a clean diaper. "Pretty sure she's got a full load. Hey, I left Skitter with Glory Girl, gotta go."

"But what about…?"

He disapparated, as much to avoid the responsibility of changing a diaper as to save his friend. Fighting villains was easy, but changing a diaper? He'd rather face Behemoth. When he got to the warehouse, though, he saw he was too late.

"Holy shit, did you kill her?"

Harry found Skitter leaning over a prone, insensate Glory Girl, but one almost unrecognizable because of thousands of insect bites that covered her whole body, even chewing through bits of her clothes. Skitter looked up, her face hidden behind her mask but her tone clearly freaked.

"I thought she was impervious, like Alexandria!"

Harry rushed to the girl's side—her breathing came out in ragged, struggling gasps and her eyes were swollen shut. "Damn," he muttered.

"I've already used my epi-pens, but I don't think it's enough." Skitter now sounded almost resigned.

"Yeah, we'll get her to her sister."

"They'll capture you."

Harry looked at her for a second. "If you were the teleporter, wouldn't you?"

"Yeah." No hesitation. Skitter was not a killer; and neither was he.

"Okay, head back into the lair. I'll get her to Panacea."

He cast a feather-weight charm and lifted Glory Girl in his arms before disapparating directly to the spot he just abandoned.

"Panacea! Dallon, get your ass out here! Vicky's hurt!"

Perhaps it was a little hasty of him, but he was genuinely worried about Glory Girl. In a strange way, he liked her. Not just because she was a tasty-hot-tamale, but because…well, okay. She was just really hot, and Harry hated seeing a hot girl reduced to this swollen mass. He wondered if his extreme shallowness made him a bad person, or just a teenaged boy.

However, in retrospect, when the entirety of New Wave pounced on him accompanied by Armsmaster and fifty PRT troopers with foam sprayers, he wondered if perhaps he should have just put Vicky down and left.

He barely even had a chance to breathe before a flash of hard light struck him in the face with the same force as Ballistic's most powerful projectile, forcing him to drop the still charmed Dallon girl as he flew backward. He impacted a powerful force field that batted him face-first into the ground, where he was immediately covered in foam.

"How is she?" he heard a muffled voice through the foam.

"She's dying," a shaking, tearful Panacea said. "Severe anaphylactic shock, just like Lung. Skitter did this. I'm removing the poison now—I should be able to save her."

Even buried face-down in foam, Harry heard the _rage_ in the girl's tone. He knew now that Amy and Skitter would never be friends.

He felt the blob of foam lift, his body thoroughly stuck in it. The moment any of his body was exposed more foam was sprayed over him, though at least they left his mask and face free.

"Hi!" he said brightly when he saw the whole New Wave team gathered around him, with Armsmaster standing with arms crossed nearby. PRT soldiers hovered around him like flies. "You're welcome, glad I was able to get Glory Girl to the one person in the city who could save her. Let me know if there's anything else I can do for you."

"You almost killed her!"

That was Brandish—tall, blonde, older woman who, while being old enough to be his mom, was still pretty damned beautiful.

"She was supposed to be impervious!" Harry shouted. "Bloody hell, Skitter was as freaked as I was. She used all her epi-pens trying to keep her alive, and if she'd been the teleporter she'd be here instead of me. We're not killers of anyone not named Coil. It was an accident, and we're sorry."

"Not yet you aren't," Brandish said as she took a threatening step forward. Hard light gathered at her hands.

"Brandish, there was epinephrine in her blood," Panacea said from Glory Girl's side. "I hate to admit it, and I'm still going to make Skitter regret it, but it probably saved Glory Girl's life."

Harry tried to nod in vindication, only to receive a hard right fist to his jaw. It didn't hurt, but he wasn't sure he wanted Brandish to try anything harder.

"Yeah, how's it feel to beat up a teen-ager?" he said instead.

"I don't see a teenager, I see a villain cape," she sneered back.

"I see a fucking hot MILF," he said. "Can I…?"

This time he got hard light in the face. "Oh, right," he said when he felt his mask crack a little. "No sex jokes. It's hard to remember sometimes."

He then realized they were staring at him. In fact, Flashbang was actually holding his wife's arms while Panacea was approaching. Armsmaster had begun reaching for his halberd while the PRT troopers had backed away.

"What?" He asked.

"That was a lethal blow even for a brute," Armsmaster said. "I was about to arrest her."

"Try it," Manpower said.

Harry would have shrugged if he could.

"Yeah, I've got magic runes. That's how I kept Purity from murdering Skitter's dad and all the employees at the Dockworker's Association building. She kept hitting but couldn't take me out, and frankly I think I just wore her out. And I gotta say, that was a bad move taking her daughter. I mean, it wasn't just stupid. You guys had to sit down in a room and think, 'What's dumber than publicly unmasking a cape that can level the whole city in an hour? Oh, I know, let's take the only thing in the world that matters to her away while she's still free to blow up the fucking city!' It wasn't just stupid, it was dangerously incompetent. You want someone to blame for GG's bites? Blame the dumb-fuck shitheads who decided to try and take away the newborn baby of a flying artillery cape!"

"The Protectorate doesn't need to justify its actions to the likes of you," Armsmaster said.

"Course not, I'm not the one who almost died! Jesus, Joseph and Mary, you are an asshole. Are you the shit that let Shadow Stalker torture Skitter in her school until she triggered? The school had to be aware of it, but nothing…."

Someone foamed his face, the shits.


	24. Escalation 3

A/N: Chap 23 review responses are in my forums like normal.

* * *

 **Escalation 3.3**

Aisha discovered, quite by accident, that if she concentrated on her power, people could see her.

She did this when her mother broke down crying in the kitchen on the third day after she triggered, after the police came and notified her that her son was a cape and that he was dead. The email Mage sent—the one that was making the whole city burn—was the only reason the police ever knew that Brian Laborn was dead.

She stood in the frame of her bedroom and watched as her mother screamed and shouted at the police for lying to her. She could see the judgment in the cop's eyes. No compassion—they could see the track marks in her arms as well as anyone.

When they left, her mother collapsed against the door and slid down to the floor, crying so hard she could barely breathe.

"Aisha, where are you, baby?" the woman moaned. "Where's my baby girl?"

Aisha never wanted more to be seen, and she felt her power respond not by helping, but retreating from her anger until suddenly her mom looked up at her.

"Aisha!" She tried desperately to scramble to her feet—despite having an eighteen year old son and a fourteen year old daughter, Celia Laborn was still not even forty yet. She was a beautiful woman—or should have been.

She finally rushed to Aisha and crushed her in a hug. "Where'd you go, baby?"

Her mom was too relieved to be angry yet, but Aisha knew the anger would come.

"I knew 'bout Brian," she said simply. "Had to get out. Sorry, Mom. Didn't mean to scare you, promise."

She could see grief, anger and worry fighting for dominance in her mother's face before finally relief won over and she hugged her hard.

That night she made her mother dinner and then tucked her into bed before drifting back to the television. She saw on the news that Mage was captured while working with Purity to attack a PRT safe house.

"So he's a Nazi and a murderer," she whispered. She drifted to the kitchen for water and while there noticed her mother's knife. It wasn't a big hunting knife or anything—seven inches of black composite material, honed to a razor sharp edge. Mom carried it for defense and had used it twice.

She stared at the knife, then back at the television. _He's never touching you again._ Brian's voice whispered in her ear. _He's never going to hold you when you're scared. He'll never help you when you need it. You're on your own now. Because of that Nazi murdering fuck._

"I'll make the son of a bitch pay," Aisha whispered. "Just like you did, bro."

She took the knife and surrendered herself to her power as she walked out of her mother's apartment for the last time.

~~Simurgh's Son~~

~~Simurgh's Son~~

"Holy Mary Mother of God, you really did get an earring."

It was the first thing Harry could think of when he had the foam dissolved from his face and saw Legend standing in front of him. The man's hair was as wind-swept as always, but this close he could see carefully covered wrinkles of age at the corners of his mouth. Harry realized he had to be in his forties at least.

"Hello, Harry," Legend said. He sounded so very sad. "I came as soon as I could."

"Yeah, well, 'bout eight years too late for that, I think. Damage is already done."

They were in a very small room with pure white walls. There was no furniture, not that Harry would have been able to sit, given he was fully encased in foam, except oddly enough his hands. He tried moving them, but he was just able to see some type of bracelets that seemed to be cutting off his muscle control.

 _They learned from his escape._

"I heard what you said," the older hero stated. He had muscular arms crossed over his chest as he stood stiffly. "About…everything. I realize that I failed you. The whole Protectorate failed you."

Harry shrugged. "Don't beat yourself up about me. The Protector fails on so many levels I'm just a spec. Slaughterhouse Nine, anyone?"

" _I_ failed _you._ "

Damn it was hard to argue with Legend.

"I get it," Harry said. "I do. I was Simurgh-influenced. I was zoning and freaking people out and I knew they wouldn't have let you take me. I get it. Doesn't matter."

"Markus, Colbert and Justinian have all been apprehended and are awaiting trial in the UK," Legend said. "In return for avoiding the Birdcage Justinian testified that everything you've said is correct."

"Okay. And?"

"All charges and your sentence have been set aside and will be permanently expunged if you agree to join the Wards," Legend said. "The particular charges against Skitter and Tattletale regarding the deaths of the Undersiders, Noelle Meinhardt and Marissa Newland will also be expunged, again if they join the Wards."

Harry couldn't help but stare, his jaw gaping. After a moment, he shook himself from his shock. "So, you know we're innocent. You know we were framed by a corrupt PRT assistant director, and yet you're still trying to press-gang us into the Wards?"

Legend didn't budge or change expression. "You helped a convicted felon escape custody, Harry. More importantly, you assaulted Wards while they were acting in the line of duty, and very nearly killed Glory Girl."

"Then saved her," Harry pointed out.

"That doesn't negate the assault."

"No, probably not. She'd have done worse to us, but because she's a hero she'd get away with it. See, that's the problem. You use the words hero and villain, but they don't _mean_ anything. The Protectorate doesn't care about protecting anyone. You let monsters walk around free so that they might help with the Endbringers. And yet how many innocent people have had their lives ruined by all those criminal capes you let free? I used to look up to you. You were my hero for a long time, and I still think you're a genuinely good man. Problem is, you're the only one." He sighed. "I think I'd rather go to the Birdcage than join the Wards. I'm sorry."

That did get a response from Legend. He dropped his arms and stepped to the edge of a red line Harry could just barely see on the floor. "Harry, you can't mean that. The Birdcage is no type of life for a teen. Your life would effectively be over."

"My life was over when the Simurgh murdered my mum and dad," Harry said simply, meeting the other man's gaze with his own. "Eidolon was right. It would have been a kindness to just let them shoot me like all the rest."

"You're upset," Legend decided. "I should have given you more time to think about it. We'll talk again soon."

He turned and left the room and Harry let his head drop. Almost unbidden, memories of captivity began scrolling through his mind. He found it deeply disturbing how often Harry Potter _failed_ to escape when captured.

~~Simurgh's Son~~

~~Simurgh's Son~~

"The agreement was to help you rescue Coil's hostage," Purity said as she cradled her baby in her arms. "I have no interest in trying to rescue your friend from the Protectorate."

"Then get the fuck out!" Skitter didn't scream. Her rage was cold, not hot.

Purity didn't even hesitate and started for the stairs that led down from their apartment balcony to the ground floor of their evil lair. Tattletale stood quickly from the table where they'd met to discuss freeing Harry.

"Purity, wait. You still owe us. Harry wasn't part of the deal, I get it. Fulfill your end of the bargain. Help us rescue Dinah Alcott."

"You're biggest asset is gone," Purity pointed out.

"Yeah, but the girl who took down Lung and Glory girl is right there. And you could level the whole city if you wanted to. I've got a fairly good idea where Dinah is being held. Help us save her like you promised, and we're done. You owe us that much at least."

Skitter saw Canary moved slowly to Tattletale's side, looking concerned as much with Purity's volatility as anything. The past few hours with the cape proved that Kayden Anders was not a stable personality at all.

 _Not that any of us are._

Danny Hebert walked out onto the balcony, still looking conflicted but also oddly determined. Taylor didn't know whether to be relieved or upset to find that he was still there when she returned. They'd waited up much of the night until the PHO announced the capture of Mage after a life-threatening assault on Glory Girl.

"You were quick to kill and tear down the city for your daughter," he said. Despite the fact he was talking to a cape who could kill him in a second, his voice dripped contempt. "But if it's someone else's child you don't care? My daughter risked her life to save your child. Her friend got captured to save your child. Even if you didn't owe them anything, you owe it to that little girl this Coil has to do at least as much as others have done for you!"

"You know nothing of cape business."

"Lady, this isn't cape business," Danny snapped back. "Mothers, fathers and daughters. That has nothing to do with being a cape. That has everything to do with being a decent human being. Even if you're not, the least you can do is aspire to be half as good as the kids who saved your daughter!"

"Go Danny," Tattletale said softly, just loud enough for Skitter to hear.

Purity (Taylor just could not think of the woman by any other name) stood stock-still, holding her sleeping baby to her shoulder while unconsciously bouncing her gently. The baby's left arm hung loosely down her shoulder, motionless with the baby's profound sleep despite the noise around her.

Until a loud _dong_ echoed through the cavernous lair from the warehouse next door. That startled Aster wide awake, and a second later she started expressing her displeasure with that turn of events by wailing loudly.

"I think someone might be at the door," Danny said, a little nervous himself.

Skitter concentrated and a moment later formed a drone outside the warehouse. Since almost dying at Bakuda's hands, she'd discovered that with concentration she could hear and speak through her bugs, and could use her insects to feel a person good enough to almost see.

What her power told her was that a dragon sat patiently on the edge of the warehouse's wards cradling a girl. "Who are you?" she asked through her drone.

The dragon sounded remarkably feminine. "Shit, you scared me!"

"You're a dragon, and _I_ scared _you?_ "

The chuckle was almost as surprising as the voice itself. "Yeah, I suppose so. You're Skitter, right? Is Harry or Tattletale here?"

"Who's asking?"

"Genesis."

Taylor relayed the information and Tattletale did a little arm-pull in celebration. "Yes! She got away. And her breaker state saw through Harry's bullshit, just like I hoped. I'll go bring her in, she was Sundancer's best friend—a member of the Travelers."

Lisa ran down the stairs and across the floor, leaving Purity to try and sooth her crying baby while Taylor stood looking at her admittedly nervous dad.

"Can I hold her?"

The three of them turned to look at Canary, who shrugged with a wry smile. "I was studying to be an early development teacher and sang on the side when…well, you know. I'm really good with kids."

It was a mark of how upset Purity was that she handed the screaming baby over after only a moment's hesitation. Rather than rock her, Canary held her up to see the feather's in her hair. "Hello, sweetheart. What's that?"

Aster became too enthralled with the brilliant yellow feathers to worry about crying any more. By the time Tattletale returned with a dragon carrying a sleeping girl with unusually skinny legs, Canary had settled Aster down and walked her back into the apartments to lay her down for a nap.

The dragon gently placed the girl in one of the porch chairs before puffing away as if it were made of smoke. The sitting girl opened her eyes and almost immediately started tearing up. "Oh, shit that hurts!" she whispered.

"What happened?" Tattletale asked.

"Took a bad fall getting out of the van," the girl, Genesis, said. "Trickster and Ballistic are going to be so pissed at me. Where's Harry?"

"That's a long story," Tattletale said. "But now that you're here, we might be able to do something about it. Do you know where in his base Coil has Dinah Alcott hidden?"

~~Simurgh's Son~~

~~Simurgh's Son~~

Skitter could not express in words how odd it was to be going to a potential cape battle with her father driving the Suburban. However, in her regular form Genesis turned out to be a paraplegic girl named Jess. And though Skitter, Purity and Tattletale were strong women, they weren't quite strong enough to carry her around. So it was Danny who carried her bridal style to their Suburban. More importantly, Canary was the one staying behind to watch Aster until they were ready for her to play her part, since Purity didn't trust the baby to anyone else in Coven.

"Coil was on his way to a meeting with Accord in Boston," Jess explained from the backseat as they drove through the evening streets of Brockton Bay. Skitter couldn't help but notice how nervous her father looked just being out after dark in the gang-infested areas. "He couldn't skip the meeting. Accord gets homicidal when he's slighted. Like, murder whoever is responsible for the slight type. But I'm willing to bet he sent Trickster and Ballistic back. He also has Faultline's crew on retainer. They're good."

"If you see an orange-skinned Case 53, stay away from him," Lisa said from the passenger seat. "His skin is highly hallucinogenic."

Purity rode in the back. Lisa had whispered to Taylor that the older woman was actually approaching the limit to her power, after the constant usage first against Harry and then against New Wave. Indeed, the cape had dark rings under her eyes and looked as if she were about to fall over asleep right there in the backseat next to Jess.

"At the very least, there are going to be soldiers," Jess continued. "After the whole thing with …with Marissa, Coil went on a hiring spree. He's probably got 200 soldiers there."

Skitter met Tattletale's eyes. "No holding back," Skitter said.

From behind the wheel, Danny shook his head. "Do you girls really think you can take on 200 soldiers?"

Tattletale chuckled. "Mr. Hebert, your daughter could take on a battalion by herself. There's a reason why the PRT gave up on commando responses to capes. They learned that lesson not just with Nilbog, but with dozens of other capes around the world. The power imbalance is…utterly unfair. Alright, slow down and park here. We want to stay out of sight of the building. Skitter, how many bugs you got?"

"There are millions in this area, we're right over a sewer," Taylor said. "I'm ready when everyone else is."

"Let's do this," Tattletale said.

~~Simurgh's Son~~

~~Simurgh's Son~~

Dmitri did not like capes for the most part. With their store-bought Halloween costumes and self-centered views of the world, he felt that the introduction of capes into the world was when the world truly started falling apart. He viewed Scion not as the ultimate savior, like many, but as the harbinger of the End Times. He was a golden-skinned anti-Christ come to lead the whole human race into damnation.

The only capes he could tolerate were those who did not put themselves above their fellow man; or who paid him a great deal of money not to care. Of the former, he found he could tolerate Ballistic, though he preferred him when he was in a tactical uniform as Luke. Of the later, Coil paid very well.

However, Coil was also proof of a maxim Dmitri's mother lived by—money could not buy happiness. Dmitri was one of Coil's mercenary captains; as such he was privy to the fact that almost all of Coil's plans had gone asunder. He knew his employer kidnapped the Alcott girl as a means of avoiding traps just like this. However, he also knew that it would take time to control her with drugs. She'd resisted for almost a week now, and the few times he looked in on her she appeared to be starved and broken. Soon, she would belong wholly to Coil, and he would have another powerful tool to stifle his enemies.

Until then, there was Dmitri and the two hundred men under his command. There were the two furious young capes, Trickster and Ballistic, whose friend Genesis had just abandoned them that afternoon. Dmitri did not care for Trickster—the boy lacked the maturity or wisdom to lead, but more than made up for those lacks with spite and vindictiveness. Ballistic was too consumed with anger and loss to realize how poorly he was being led.

The latest cape to join them appealed to Dmitri even less than Trickster. This Circus person upset his world view. Dmitri's parents had raised him right. He believed in one God, Father Almighty, Creator of heaven and earth, and of all things invisible. He believed in one Lord Jesus Christ, the only-begotten Son of God, begotten of the Father before all ages; he believed in killing first those who would kill you, in treating women with the respect one would wish one's own mother to receive, and finally that a man is as God made him and will always be a man and a woman as God made her will always be a woman.

Circus defied God's will toward man and woman, and his/her mere presence threatened Dimitri's worldview. If he had even a thought he could do so successfully, he would shoot the clown. Sadly, Circus' power included blinding reflexes among other abilities.

Better to just not think about it.

"Sir, security cameras in block three located an unmarked white Suburban. Plates are registered to an Amanda Hugginkiss."

Dimitri stared intently at Jenkins.

"Sir?" he asked.

Jenkins was very earnest, but oh so young. "Repeat the name slowly, Mr. Jenkins."

"Amanda Huggin…" The poor lad's cheeks burned. "Right. Alarm?"

"Silent only, please."

"Sir." Jenkins turned to reach for the alarm when he stopped and shouted with a gut-deep level of horror.

A _thing_ stepped from the shadows of the base, a thing writhing under a living shield of insects. Down the hall to the armory, he heard more men shouting in alarm, punctuated by rifles firing. A dozen ran into the main atrium of the base, hastily pulling on their tac vests even as they ran and tried firing behind them with assault rifles. More of the insect people followed after, gliding over the floor rather than just walking.

From the stairs dozens more men ran or even tumbled down the steps in a desperate attempt to avoid more of the insect people. While distasteful, Dimitri was disappointed in his men. He walked to the insect person who scared Jenkins so bad and tossed a simple flash-bang at it.

"Fire in the hole!" he called before turning away from the blinding phosphorescent explosion that made his ears ring.

When he turned around, he saw with satisfaction that the insect person was gone, leaving only a circle of splattered bug parts where it once stood.

"Flash bangs, people. They're only bugs."

He would later wonder at the irony that, just as he made that statement, the ceiling overhead exploded in a shower of painful hard light. Jenkins, earnest youth that he was, shouted a warning and then dove at Dmitri, pushing him clear just as a half-ton piece of cement crushed him into paste.

The capes emerged from their various holes, but their powers were next to useless against the swarm that literally rose up like a tsunami of chitin and swept over the men. Circus, freak that it was, managed somehow to use a combination of fire, a giant tasseled sledgehammer, and a mid-air cartwheel to avoid the wave of bugs that left almost every one of Dmitri's men writhing on the ground gasping for air while trying to scrape the insects off their faces.

It had a hard time avoiding the veritable shower of hard light that blasted down from the new hole in the roof.

Dimitri himself slipped on a hooded gas mask he kept on his belt when he saw the bugs were going for ears, eyes, noses and mouths. It restricted his vision but gave him a precious few seconds to run to the stack of weapons crates. He tossed aside crates containing assault rifles, heavy caliber sniper rifles and RPGs to the ground until he found the crate he was looking for.

He ripped it open and grabbed one of the canister-mounted tubes. He twisted the knob at the base of the canister feed and pulled the trigger as the wave of insects approached him. A sharp clicking sound was followed a second later by a billow of shooting flame as his hand-held flamethrower burned through the wave of approaching insects.

The massive, winged gargoyle that came right behind the wall of bugs, however, caught him utterly by surprise.

"Say hi to Coil for me, you asshole," the gargoyle said in a surprisingly young, feminine voice.

It then slammed a huge rock-like fist into the side of his head, which was the last thing Dmitri was aware of.

~~Simurgh's Son~~

~~Simurgh's Son~~

"Hey, you awake in there?"

Harry blinked himself out of a fugue and saw Vista standing just inside the door. Surprisingly she didn't bother wearing her mask, though she wore the rest of her uniform. The sight of her young, childish face atop a cape costume felt jarring to Harry.

"Oh, hey Vista. How's your leg?" he asked.

She shrugged. "Aches sometimes when it rains. Been hurt worse, but I appreciate the quick healing."

"You've been hurt worse than a compound fracture? Shit, Vista, I didn't think Wards were supposed to be in that much danger. Good thing I'm not joining." He said it lightly, but he could see she knew as well as he that it wasn't a joke.

She sank down to the floor, below the one-sided viewing window, and stared up at him intently. "I've read about you. How you were eight when the Simurgh came after you and killed your family. I was eight when ABB thugs killed my family."

She waited for him to say something, express sympathy or give her the normal platitudes that adults always gave children who suffered. The problem was there were no words that could make something like that better.

"Sucks, doesn't it?" he finally said.

"Yeah." She nodded, smiling without humor. "You know, about nine months ago, Oni Lee stabbed me in the chest. Right here." She pointed to a spot just left of her sternum. "Kid Win blasted his clone away before it went too deep and I told the rest it was nothing. Sewed it up myself that night. Hurt like a bitch."

Harry stared, keeping the anger hidden. "'Cause you didn't want them treating you like a baby. I get it. Marko used to spray his people with acid to mark them. If they cried too much, he'd shoot them. So I didn't cry too much when he sprayed my back."

Just as he didn't give her useless platitudes, neither did she to him. Instead, he saw just the faintest glimmer of moisture in the corners of her eyes. "You get it, don't you? You really get it."

"Yeah. Wish to God I didn't. I hate it, but I get it."

"No one else around here does. They think they're gonna grow up and get girlfriends or boyfriends and be happy. They actually think that. Gallant was talking to Aegis about asking Glory Girl to marry him once he turns twenty one, as if any of us are ever going to see twenty one."

She used the heel of one hand to wipe away a lone tear that escaped from the corner of her eyes. "I used to think having a power would make me happy. It just makes things even more fucked up."

"Yeah."

Harry wished he could hug her, but he couldn't actually move at all. Evidently it was difficult for most teleporters to use their power when their bodies were completely bound by foam. Who knew?

"Hey, Vista?"

"Yeah?"

"I can't make anything better. But I'll be glad to be your friend. 'Least 'til they Birdcage me."

She smiled weakly at him. "I guess I'll take what I can get."

The door opened and Legend walked in, muscular and wind-swept with a touch of blush on his cheeks and concealer at the corners of his mouth to hide the wrinkles.

"You kidnapped Dinah Alcott?" he demanded, actually angry.

Harry blinked back, mentally somersaulting from Vista to his one-time icon. "Er, no. Coil kidnapped her. Then he figured out I was working with Tattletale to try and save her and that's when he set us all up to die. Why? Did Skitter free her? Because that'd be awesome if she did."

Legend stiffened and folded his arms over his broad chest. "Your gang has offered to exchange Dinah Alcott for you."

"Oh, well, that's nice of them," Harry offered lamely. "Seems fair. Don't you think, Vista?"

Legend frowned before turning to stare down at the cape on the floor, who just happened to be the same age as Dinah Alcott. She smiled and waved up at the tall hero, slipping easily into the innocent little girl routine.

"Vista, what are you doing here?"

"I'm trying to seduce her to the dark side with the promise of unlimited frozen yogurt and pizza," Harry said. "No bedtimes, home-schooling if you want it. And you haven't ever heard a bedtime lullaby until you hear Canary sing."

"Sounds wonderful," Vista said with a grin that could have given Tattletale a run for her money.

"Vista, can you please return to your dorm?" Legend managed to sound nice, at least.

The girl sounded like an old woman with her sigh. She climbed back to her feet and waved at Harry. "See you soon, I hope."

"Yeah, you too."

When she was gone, Legend looked back at Harry suspiciously. "What were you talking about?"

"Just about how many commonalities we've had in our lives, despite my being kidnapped and raised by villains, and her being raised by Wards. You know, it's actually kind of depressing that kid-capes are screwed either way."

The two merely looked at each other for the longest time. "Please be honest, Harry. Is Dinah Alcott in danger?"

Harry snorted. "From Coven? Skitter'd sooner hurt herself than hurt an innocent little girl. We're only villains because you made us be, Legend. You and your Protectorate."

"What will they do if we refuse?"

"This is me shrugging. Just imagine it." Harry grinned. "They'll let her go eventually, unless she wants to stay with them. She is a cape now, after all. Then they'll just come after me directly, probably."

"That would be unwise," Legend warned.

"Maybe. You know, I don't think Skitter has an upper limit on how many insects she can control. But really, the question you should ask yourself isn't if you should play hardball or not, but what you expect to get out of playing hardball. I know the PRT wants to. I imagine if you weren't here I'd be on my way to the Birdcage again if Piggot had her way. But what does it get you?"

Harry wished he could shake his head. "I'm not going to join the Wards, Legend. I trust you because I think you're a good man, but I can't trust any of the people you trust—that you have to trust. I don't trust the system. I _can't_. It's too broken. So the only way I can live is outside. The only way I can make a difference is from the outside looking in."

"Harry, you're only sixteen…."

"I've seen eons," Harry said, surprised at how deep his voice suddenly dropped. "I've seen things you can't imagine. Atrocities beyond the scope not just of your understanding, but of this planet itself. I've seen acts of pleasure that would reduce you to putty and acts of horror that would make Scion weep. The Simurgh ripped my mind open. Harry Bailey died that day."

Legend went very still, studying Harry intently. "Then who are you, Harry?"

"Still trying to figure that part out," he admitted. "So, I guess the question of the day is do you play the part of the bad cop and force the issue? Dinah won't be hurt, but any chance the Protectorate ever has of ever working with me or Coven goes away forever. You'll be my enemies. Or you use this exchange as a way to save face, let me go, and know that if the Protectorate ever truly needs me, I'd be willing to help."

"You have a high regard for yourself. Do you think your friends could take me?"

"Probably not. But again, what would you gain? You're part of the Triumvirate. Beating up a bunch of teens doesn't sound impressive."

"Purity is no teenager."

"Yeah, she's also not a part of Coven. That was a temporary truce at best. Tattletale rejected her outright for the whole Nazi thing. You know, even villains hate Nazis. But damn her baby is cute. Hey, did you know Menja and Fenja are single?"

"I'm not," Legend said sharply. He looked down at the floor while considering his options. He then turned abruptly and left the room. He didn't notice the small handful of flies that managed to push past the light blow of air caused by differing air pressures. Harry, though, watched the flies with interest as they buzzed into the room and began exploring both his face and the foam around him.

Grinning, he blew one of the flies away, only for to fly right up his nose until he had a sneezing fit. _Oh very funny, Skitter!_

"This ought to be interesting," he muttered.


	25. Escalation 4

A/N: Chap 24 review responses are in my forums. Thanks for reading.

* * *

 **Escalation 3.4**

Sitting in one of the many narrow parks that lined the Heroes Way—the boulevard that ran by the PRT headquarters in the city itself—Taylor and Lisa drank tea from a thermos. In the Suburban parked two blocks back at a small bookstore, Jess listened in on the stolen radios they all used, courtesy of Coil's armory.

"Fourth floor containment cell, looks like they have full Mover protocols—he's foamed up to his neck," Taylor said, describing what her flies detected.

" _Think they'll go for the trade?_ " Jess asked over the encrypted line.

"No, and I'm not sure why," Tattletale said, frowning in puzzlement. "We saw Legend fly in, and he is pretty much the only one in the Protectorate who has a decent history with Harry."

"It almost makes me wish Purity was still here," Taylor muttered.

Lisa shook her head. "We're better off with her gone. No, who I really miss is Bitch. She was our hard hitter before you came along. You're bugs make you powerful, but there was something to be said about a trio of car-sized, heavily armored monster dogs."

"No argument there from me. She had issues, but she didn't deserve what Coil had Shadow Stalker do to her."

"How are your bugs doing?"

"Little over two million so far."

" _You know, I'm not sure I could even count to two million,"_ Jess said over the radio. " _How the fuck do you even know?"_

"Secondary Thinker power," Tattletale said as she squinted and tried to study the PRT headquarters. "So, think it's time?"

Taylor nodded. Both went without masks and with loose-fitting clothes over their costumes. They made a show of finishing their tea and walking back toward the central portion of the city, staying well away of the Suburban where Jess waited for the signal.

Two large, unmarked white vans suddenly screeched to a halt in front of the young women. The doors slid open on one, revealing half a dozen men in black tactical vests with PRT badges at their shoulders and foam sprayers on their backs, though they held assault rifles in their hands.

"PRT, on the ground now!" The leader of the squad, a narrow-faced man with a hairline that had abandoned merely receding and was now in full retreat, shouted loudly.

Faced with a dozen assault rifles, Taylor raised her hands and dropped to her knees. Tattletale did the same, and neither resisted as two of the men walked around and secured their hands with zip-ties. Startled civilians watched from the sidewalks or even office building windows as the entire event went down.

The leader lifted a radio from the strap on his vest. "Headquarters, this is Agent Yarnoz, ID AGG-1265T on special assignment out of Boston. We have apprehended Skitter and Tattletale and are on our way in. Prepare containment."

" _Say again, you caught Skitter and Tattletale?"_

"Roger. They were sitting on a bench five hundred feet away from your building," Dimitri Yarnoz, a licensed PRT contractor, said. "Myrddin had a feeling they'd be making a move for Mage. We're bringing them in."

" _Roger, we'll be waiting!"_

The men pulled Taylor and Lisa to the first of the two vans. No one said anything as a third van fell into their formation as they pulled onto Hero's Way. A group of soldiers stepped out of a side entrance to the PRT Headquarters building, and among them stood the distinctive figure of Miss Militia, an American flag scarf hiding her features, while a larger flag cinched her waist just over the tight fitting camo pants and tank-top. The air by her hands shimmered as weapons materialized and changed, until she held an assault rifle herself.

"Show me," she said when the other PRT agents signaled the van to halt.

"Open the door," Dimitri ordered.

Taylor stared intently at the hero who looked into the van.

"This game of yours is over, Skitter, Tattletale," she said. "Time to grow up." She slammed the door shut and patted the side of the van hard to signal it to continue.

They drove into an entrance facing north toward the Boat Graveyard. Three separate checkpoints confirmed Dimitri's status as a free-lance consulting agent of the PRT before finally all three white vans stopped.

Miss Militia had walked alongside the vans through each check point. Inside the final checkpoint stood twenty agents and another Protectorate Cape.

"Velocity," Lisa breathed near Taylor's ears. "Fast, not strong."

Dimitri and his men climbed out, pulling Taylor and Lisa out as well. Six more men climbed out from the second van. One of the building's PRT agents walked to the third van and opened the door, only to stand and stare with a wide-eyed expression of horror.

Hundreds of thousands of insects swarmed out of the back of the van, engulfing him and cutting his terrified scream short. Miss Militia and Velocity both started to react nearly instantaneously; Dimitri and his men were just that much faster, having already positioned themselves. Foam sprayers trapped Velocity's feet and Miss Militia's weapon-producing hands.

The rest of the fake PRT soldiers fired fast-acting darts into the legitimate agents so quickly the poor men and women had no chance to defend themselves.

"You can't possibly think you can get away with this," Miss Militia said from the mound of foam that now thoroughly contained her.

Skitter stripped off her loose clothes to reveal the costume below. She calmly slipped on her mask. "We offered a fair trade, and you didn't want to play," she said. "Now we do it the hard way."

She turned to fight Coil's mercenaries. "Gentlemen," she said, now also to the masked agents. "Remember, we're in custody still until we reach the containment level."

Neither of the girls commented as a winged gargoyle stepped from the last van, which was now insect free. The massive creature looked at Velocity with a sniff before staring at Miss Militia.

"Big fan," the gargoyle said with a young woman's voice. "I'd ask for an autograph, but…well, you know."

The tranquilized agents were tossed like cordwood into the two closest vans and ID badges were switched. Skitter and Tattletale both put their hands behind their backs and let their dozen men guide them into the heart of the PRT headquarters.

They reached the elevator which appeared to be undefended. Lisa took one look at it and said, "Stairs."

No one protested. It gave Skitter time to continue infiltrating the building with her bugs. Genesis came up behind the twelve men, obvious but necessary because of the power of her projected body. In the absence of Bitch's dogs, Genesis was their only Brute-style hitter.

Lights began flashing in the stairwell, followed by a piercing alarm.

"Well, knew it was too good to last," Lisa muttered. "Come on, kids, let's get moving! Skitter?"

"On it."

Overhead, lights began to flicker as the millions of insects that now infested the building attacked electrical wiring. They heard a door open overhead—Genesis launched herself into the air column between the flights of stairs until she found the source of the noise. Instantly they heard terrified screams.

They reached the scene just moments later. Dimitri's men quickly tranquilized and secured the PRT agents that Genesis either distracted or beat up before moving on. With the alarm going already, there was no point to pretending to be prisoners.

They reached the fourth floor where the containment cells were and spilled out into the hallway.

Skitter took one look at the team waiting for her and felt her stomach clench up like a fist. She anticipated the Wards—Vista, Kid Win, Gallant, Clockblocker and Aegis. Not even Armsmaster was a surprise.

They knew Legend was in the building and faced the possibility that he might face them as well.

But fucking _Alexandria?_

"Skitter, didn't you tell me you had an Alexandria lunchbox as a little girl?" Tattletale asked loudly.

"And Armsmaster undies," Skitter said, too terrified to be embarrassed.

Armsmaster seemed less than impressed. Alexandria simply took a step forward with a piercing dark gaze.

"This game is over, children," she said, echoing what Miss Militia said earlier. "There's only one way this ends without all of you getting very, badly hurt."

~~Simurgh's Son~~

~~Simurgh's Son~~

Harry was expecting bugs to come eat the foam away at any moment. Taylor pretty much made it clear they were engaging in a rescue operation—she had to be close to get him the message.

He was not expecting a knife to appear out of nowhere and stab his forehead hard enough to strike a spark when the runes redirected it into the metal frame that held his foamed body upright.

"Ow," he said, more by reflex than because it hurt. "Who's there? What was that?"

The knife came again, even harder this time. Again his runes redirected it without it even scratching him. As he stared, a girl came into focus, almost like a mirage. She wore torn jeans and a halter top that did little to hide the almost fluorescent pink bra. Her black hair had one bleached stripe with a strand of purple riding in the middle Her face looked like a picture of a composite from all the prettiest models in the world distilled down to a perfect oval shape in mocha, and then put in a cheap, plastic frame by way of bad dime-store make-up liberally painted on.

Not that he cared. He was staring so happily at her top he barely noticed as she stabbed the knife directly at his eye. His temple rune again redirected it.

"Fuck!" the girl shouted. "Why won't you die?"

"Show me those beautiful tits and I might."

She turned the blade and hit him in the temple with all her might, which was enough to turn his head a little. Harry felt he was justified in making bad sex jokes about breathtakingly hot young women in revealing, trashy clothes trying to kill him, and was preparing another when he noticed she was crying even while she continued trying to stab him in the head.

Damn it, crying girls just left him utterly helpless.

"Um, look, I know you're busy trying to kill me and all, I get that, but could you slow down enough to tell me why?"

"Fuck you!" She stabbed at one of his hands, and in the process broke the magnetic envelope that kept him from vanishing then foam. He stared down at his suddenly free hand.

"Huh, thanks."

She backed away as he quickly began vanishing the foam from the rest of his body. He turned back to…wait. How'd he get free?

What…? He looked around for bugs or other proof Taylor was there, only for the secondary security system to kick in. Foam almost exploded out in massive volumes from nozzles set in the top of the walls. Harry quickly summoned a shield around himself, only to falter when he felt a knife poking his stomach. He looked down and saw the same girl from before trying her very best to ram a knife into his stomach within his shield.

"Yeah, sorry, my skin's pretty knife proof," he said.

She tried punching him, and when that didn't do anything she tried the knee in the crotch trick. "Why won't you fucking die?" she cried.

Making a sudden decision, Harry grabbed her and apparated just as he let the shield drop. They emerged in the observation room on the other side of the glass wall. The girl spun around and then started to fade away again, not just from his sight but his memory.

 _Click._ His mind began moving faster as he recognized a foreign influence on his memories. He beat the influence back, refusing to let anything affect his thoughts, and just like that the girl reappeared. She tensed when he met her gaze, but then attacked again with her knife.

This time he caught it, spun her wrist until she released it, then spun her back until she was against him, one arm around her neck, the other locking her arm behind her back.

"So why'd you sneak all the way into PRT headquarters to kill me?"

"For Brian, you murdering fuck!"

"Brian?"

"Grue! You killed my brother!"

Harry released her as if she were acid. "Brian…? Oh shit, Taylor said he had a sister. He was trying to… My God. I'm so sorry."

"Not yet, you fuck! Somehow I'm going to find a way to kill you!"

"I didn't kill him. I was trying to save him from Bakuda. I just…I failed."

"Bullshit. TV said…"

"TV said what the man responsible for all this shit wanted it to say. You know about Tattletale, right? Did Brian trust her?"

"Mostly." She looked suspicious and appeared ready to bolt—only the fact he could see her kept her in place.

"She and Skitter both joined Coven," Harry said. "All of this was Coil. Coil was Brian's real boss, and he left us all out to dry. Please come with us. I…I owe you. For failing to save your brother, I owe you. I know that. Come with us and at least talk to Tattletale or Skitter. You know Skitter had a thing for him, right?"

"Yeah, I know," she admitted.

"I promise I won't hurt you. And you can't hurt me, so it doesn't do any good to try. Will you come? Please?"

"How can you see me? I walked right past Alexandria herself and she could…"

"What did you say?" Harry interrupted. "Alexandria's here?"

"Yeah, so?"

He grabbed her hand, much to her displeasure, and started running toward the doors to the main hall. The PRT agents, because of the foam, were never able to search him for his staff, which he'd kept in a charmed pouch on his belt. He pulled it out now as he ran with Brian's sister, whom he still didn't know by name, only to pause as ants and termites crawled onto the door in front of him.

 _ALEXANDRIA AND LEGEND IN BUILDING. FIFTY FEET AHEAD OF YOU, ONE HUNDRED FEET TO YOUR LEFT._

"That's gross," the girl announced.

He looked around the room—it was the control room for a dozen cells just like his, all designed to hold powerful parahumans for transport to the Birdcage or whatever other prison was warranted. There was no furniture or loose items to transfigure at all.

He looked back down at his would-be assassin. "What's your name?"

"Why do you care?"

Harry shrugged. "You're the sister of a guy I wanted to save but failed. Also, you're absolutely fucking hot. So I could call you 'Sister of Grue" or "Super-fucking hot bird", but in an emergency both may take too long to say. And Skitter told me 'bird is a demeaning word that I'm supposed to stop using. So, your name would be easier."

She stared up at him, evidently too confused to be angry. "You…I'm trying to fucking kill you and all you can say is that I'm hot?"

"You have a nice personality too?" Harry hazarded.

"My name's Aisha, fucktard."

"Great!" He grabbed her arm and spun them both into disapparation.

A second later the two of them appeared in a spot between Tattletale and Skitter on one side of a wide hallway and two thirds of the Triumvirate itself on the other. He quickly saw the Wards behind the two elder heroes.

"Holy shit, it really is Alexandria!" he exclaimed the moment he appeared. "Damn, Legend, really? Bringing in your final solution just to get me into the Wards?"

"How'd you get out?" Kid Win blurted from behind Legend.

Harry shrugged. "Magic."

Alexandria exploded into motion, flying toward them like a missile. Aisha shied away with a squeak of alarm. Harry barely had time to summon a shield anchored to the walls. She hit it head on. The _boom_ shook the building, cracked the walls he used to anchor it, and the shield itself shimmered like cracked glass.

But Alexandria stumbled back genuinely surprised that it held.

Unfortunately, it was about that time that Miss Militia, Assault, Battery, Triumph and thirty more PRT agents with containment foam spilled out of the stairwell behind them. Miss Militia looked like a drowned rat, with her wet hair plastered down over her bandana mask. A very, very _pissed_ drowned rat.

"There is no way out for you and your men," Alexandria said with an unflappable calm that betrayed no anxiety at all over the fact his shield stopped her.

"Eh, we don't care about the men," Tattletale said with a dismissive wave of her hand. "These were all Coil's mercenaries—the ones we captured when we freed Dinah Alcott. Canary asked them nicely to help us, but when we're done you can have them. Now, that said, as much as Harry's power utterly sucks ass in a way normal teleportation shouldn't…"

"Because it's magic, not power-based," Harry said over his shoulder.

"…I think we'll be going now."

Tattletale and Skitter both rushed forward to grab Harry's arms even as Harry grabbed Aisha. Alexandria and Legend both surged forward, but they were not fast enough and all four disappeared with a pop.

Left behind, the huge Gargoyle grinned.

"You know, if she had Armsmaster skivvies as a little girl, then she's probably been shitting and pissing on Armsmaster since she was a toddler." The monster sounded like a young woman before it too disappeared with a pop.

The remaining mercenaries blinked suddenly and looked around. They found themselves facing the most powerful heroes not just in the city, but in the country itself, flanked by half a hundred PRT agents, and very slowly put their guns on the floor.

"Er, we surrender?" Dmitri said.

* * *

A/N: Short but hopefully sweet. But definitely short.


	26. Escalation 5

A/N: Chap 25 review responses are in my forums like normal. Thanks for reading.

* * *

 **Escalation 3.5**

The four of them—Tattletale, Skitter, Aisha and Harry—all appeared with a loud clap of displaced air in the middle of their lair. Almost immediately, Lisa spun around and collapsed to her knees with dry heaves, while Skitter actually stumbled and fell backwards on her rear from vertigo.

Aisha looked at the two girls with a confused scowl.

"The fuck's wrong with them? They get shot or something?"

"They don't like my teleportation," Harry explained. Like Canary or Purity, Aisha didn't appear affected by it at all.

Speaking of unattainable hotness, Harry saw Canary walking toward them from the apartments. "Who're you talking to, Harry?" she asked.

Harry turned and glared at Aisha. "Stop it."

"Fuck you, I don't owe you shit!" Aisha snapped back. "You fucking killed my brother and… what the…put me down!"

Harry shook his head and continued to levitate her five feet off the ground. "Pull back your power, and I'll let you down."

"Harry?" Canary said.

"Taylor didn't actually free me," he said over his shoulder.

"I couldn't get enough bugs through the electrical grid they used to filter the air into his cell," Taylor admitted from the floor. "Guess they were expecting me."

"So, a Stranger snuck in to try and kill me. Knife to the face, things like that. Accidently broke one of my bindings. Tattletale, Grue had a sister, right?"

From the floor, Lisa moaned a little as she forced herself to sit upright.

"Yeah," she said. "Aisha. He loved her more than anything in the world. He ordered me to put his share of the Undersiders loot into a separate account for her if anything happened. I have about a quarter million set aside for her, but never had a chance to contact her about it. He warned me her mother would try taking it."

Lisa looked around, frowning, but still couldn't see the newcomer. "She's here, isn't she? Must be a high ranked Stranger power, I can't get a hold of her at all."

Harry looked back to Aisha, who instead of shouting or cursing, was staring at Tattletale with a flurry of emotions on her face. Abruptly she pulled back her power.

"Quarter million?" she demanded.

Lisa sighed, almost in relief, to see her. "Hello, Aisha. Harry, put her down, please."

Harry complied and Aisha stood trembling, knife in hand, as Lisa casually walked over before gently pulling her into a hug. Aisha didn't stab her at least, but looked rather like a deer in headlights when Lisa backed away.

"Brian was a good man," Lisa told the younger girl gently. "He wanted to make sure you had a chance in life. I'm so sorry we couldn't save him."

Aisha looked back at Lisa with a trembling life. "You tell me," she said harshly, her voice cracking. "You tell me what happened to my brother."

Still smiling in a sad expression, Lisa put an arm around the shorter girl's shoulders and started leading her toward the apartments. "I'll tell you anything you want to know, promise."

Harry stared after her, his own heart breaking. He almost jumped when Taylor, of all people, took his hand. "You okay?"

He shook his head. "The world is utterly, completely fucked. Legend told me they knew we were innocent, and were willing to expunge our records, but only if we joined the Wards. Isn't that insane? They know we're innocent, they just don't care."

"Maybe you should join," Canary said. Harry looked at her and noticed she didn't see thrilled at the idea. He wasn't either.

"And have to share you ladies with other boys?" he asked, shuddering. "Hell no. I'm the only guy in Coven, surrounded by gorgeous women. Why would I give that up?"

"Oh, yes, you've got it going on, lady's man," Taylor said with a roll of her eyes. "A lesbian, an a-sexual, a paraplegic, me, and possibly a teen young enough that if you even think about touching her I'll have a swarm of cockroaches eat your prostate from the inside."

Harry shuddered. "How could you even think such a thing?"

"You were staring at her chest."

Harry opened his mouth to protest, but then stopped. "Well, in my defense, the girl has some killer boobs. I didn't know they made girls like her."

"You should have seen her brother," Taylor said. "They have really good genes in their family. But she's fourteen, Harry."

"But…but…I'm only sixteen!"

"I think it's this little thing called age of consent," Canary said wryly.

Harry sagged. "I know. Besides, she blames me for Grue. But, hey, you guys got Dinah, right?"

"About that…"

~~Simurgh's Son~~

~~Simurgh's Son~~

Dinah Alcott looked way too thin for her age and frame. She lay on her side shivering on the lower bunk bed in one of the spare rooms. Even closed, he could see dark, shadowy rings of exhaustion and stress around her eyes.

Harry sat by her side, holding her hand, when Jess rolled her wheelchair into the room. He looked up, staring for a long moment, at one of his first friends in the country. He left Dinah's side and knelt down beside her chair.

"You're okay," he breathed. He grabbed her other hand. "You…you know it wasn't me, don't you? Please tell me you know. I'd never hurt her, never in…"

"I get it, dork," Jess said in a thick voice. "I know. It was Francis. After Marissa…after she freed Noelle, he went nuts. Coil helped him cover it up and make it look like you did it. I'm just sorry he managed to convince Luke."

He started to hug her, but she shook her head firmly. "Don't. I hurt my back again escaping. Not having a wheelchair hasn't helped. Skitter's dad has been having to carry me around."

"Where is he?" Harry asked.

"He drove Jess and the Suburban back after we freed you, but then had to go back to work," Taylor explained.

"Well, I can fix the chair at least." Harry transfigured the chair into a good copy of her wheelchair. He even added the magical equivalent of movement. "I'll have to keep recharging it every day or so, but that should give you some motion. Jess, you know about the elevators, right?"

Jess stared. Behind them, both Taylor and Canary also stared as they came in. "What elevators?" Skitter said.

"Just look for the _Raidṑ_ rune on the walls," Harry told them all. "It looks like a caveman-R. Just touch it and it'll activate the elevator. Oh, and if you're joining us, I'm going to have to take you down and do a blood sacrifice on the ward stone to give you full access."

"Very funny," Jess said, only to fall quiet when neither Canary nor Taylor laughed. "What the hell?"

Harry waived all around him. "Magic, Jess. My runes worked because I'm a wizard, and they didn't work on Luke because he wasn't. This is where we tested my runes. I fixed it with magic."

"I have to admit, it was pretty amazing," Taylor said. "And don't let the whole blood sacrifice thing scare you too much. We cut our wrist and bled a bit on the wardstone before he healed us. He even offered _some_ people numbing charms." She glared.

Harry ran a hand through his hair nervously. "Yeah, sorry about that. I have hundreds of thousands of years of another man's memory in my head, but I have to actually think about something to know anything about it. Just didn't think about numbing charms at first."

He then scooted toward the edge of the bed until he was able to run a hand over Dinah Alcott's sweating forehead. "I'm sorry it took us so long," he whispered.

The young girl was too lost in her withdrawal to answer. As Harry knelt down beside her, he felt memories boiling up, and with it knowledge. "I need asphodel, angels trumpet, mandrake, dittany, an armadillo and a moonstone."

"What?" Lisa said.

"A restoration potion," Harry explained. "Panacea can't heal brains, and it's Dinah's brain that has been hooked on Coil's drugs. Even if we heal her body, she's going to be affected by what Coil did to her for years. If we can find those ingredients, though, I can make a potion that will restore her mind. Without dragon's blood I can't make the full-body version, but Panacea can restore her body. I'll do the travel if you can just tell me where to look."

"We'll do the research," Taylor said. "You go shower, Harry. Seriously, it's been a while."

"You do smell bad," Jess said.

Harry didn't need to take a whiff to agree. "Right. I'll go shower, but try and be fast. I hate to see her suffering."

He emerged thirty minutes later from his apartment in casual jeans and a pullover while a slow-acting dry-cleaning charm crawled up his suit. He left his room and found Taylor next door in her room on the computer.

He could tell from the floral scent and the moisture in the air of her room that she'd just showered as well, she just must have gone faster than he did.

"There are armadillos in the National Zoo in DC," she reported from her computer as he came in. "You can find a moonstone at most jewelry wholesalers. As for the plants—again your best bet is the US Botanic Garden in DC or the Botanical Garden in New York."

"Cool. Hey, where's your uniform?"

"On the bed. Need to figure out how to wash it."

Harry conjured a mannequin bust, did a switching spell to place the suit on it, and then cast the dry-cleaning spell. "That should take care of it. Takes about twenty minutes. I'm cleaning mine. I was thinking about seeing if Canary wanted to come with just to help, but if we're going to a botanical garden your bug-power might help too. Wanna come?"

When she turned to look at him he noticed a touch of red to her cheeks. He then noticed she was wearing a halter top that exposed more skin than he'd ever seen on her while awake. He even saw a hint of cleavage there, if just barely—Taylor had killer legs, but she wasn't ever going to be top-heavy.

"What?" she demanded.

With an effort of will even Alexandria would have admired, Harry forced his eyes up to hers and noticed her cheeks were red, but her chin jutted out the way it did when she was feeling brave or stubborn.

"Nothing, zoned I guess. Thanks for finding this. Hope it works, I haven't tried making any potions yet. Did you want to come?"

"Will we have to teleport?"

Lisa appeared at their doorframe. Aisha was not with her.

"Hello, you two," she said with a suspiciously happy grin. "Talking about potion ingredients, I heard?"

"DC," Taylor said. "Not sure I want to risk another teleportation."

"I had an idea about that," Lisa said. "Honey, can you push your power away? I mean, completely disconnect yourself from your bugs?"

Taylor scowled but nodded. "Mostly. When Hess and her pals were bullying me, I had to push the bugs back to keep from using them to kill the girls."

"See, I think the reason you and I get sick, but Canary and Aisha don't, is because of our power. I can't really turn mine off, I can only limit stimuli. But if you can limit or stop your power from kicking in, it might make it better. Want to try?"

With a shrug, Taylor stood. "Sure. Give me a sec, Harry, then teleport me into the atrium."

"'Kay."

She closed her eyes with one hand on his arm, and then abruptly closed on him. "Now," she whispered, almost into his ear.

A second later they were in the atrium. He could feel her shudder, but this time she didn't spin away sick. "Back, please," she said again.

He appeared back in her room a second later. She finally let go of him and settled back in her desk chair.

"It was better," she admitted, flushed. Harry felt his own cheeks burning. She was as tall as he was, and when she hugged him and spoke, her breath crossed his ears in a most peculiar way. That wasn't even taking into account that he could feel her chest through their shirts.

Lisa's vulpine grin just made him feel more uncomfortable. "So, you going, Taylor?"

She nodded. "I'll need to get in costume, but…"

"I was going to go civilian," Harry said. "Hell, we've been unmasked and I can make us invisible. Or glamours or whatever. Hell, I might even give folks a show. Why not?"

Her smile confused him even more. He was not used to seeing Taylor smile and felt like he was missing something important. "I'd love to go," she said. "Give me a few minutes to get dressed."

"Uh, sure. Yeah." He stepped into the hall only for the door to close behind him, with Lisa still inside. "Huh, why'd she stay?"

He started to move when he noticed Aisha hovering in the hall. Her power was active, but his Occlumancy had come to recognize her power well enough he didn't even need to think about pushing it back.

"So, still want to kill me?"

She grinned, and it looked disconcertingly like Lisa's. "Thought you killed him. But just now—now I know you're not that smart. So, where's my room?"

Harry tried to catch up to what just happened. "I am too smart!"

"Maybe about school shit. But girls? You're an idiot."

"So. You're short!"

"Maybe. But I got a nice rack."

All Harry's arguments faded away. "Yeah," he said with a goofy smile. "Can I see them?"

"Maybe. How much money you got?"

"Aisha, sweetie, let's not encourage Harry here," Lisa said as she stepped out of Taylor's room. "Besides, you might break him, and he's kind of our best emergency escape route. Come on, I'll show you your room."

Aisha followed, but then turned and walked backwards. When she did, she wore a truly wicked grin, leaned down even as she walked backwards and pulled her top out enough to give Harry a stunning view.

"That girl is going to be trouble," he whispered.

"Yeah."

Harry jumped and saw Canary beside him. "Gah, you scared me!"

"Obviously your attention was elsewhere," the older woman said with a knowing smile.

"Well, you saw them. How's it fair for a fourteen-year-old to have breasts like that? I feel dirty even talking about them!"

"But not seeing them?"

"Not my fault."

"So that would be a no, then?"

Harry sagged. "I'm not winning this, am I?"

"Nope. I think Taylor's ready."

He turned and saw Taylor step out in a very tight, curve-hugging pair of jeans and a nice heavy cream blouse with sleeves that ended at the elbow. Her long, curly hair was pulled back and looped through a New England Patriot's baseball cap.

He scowled at her, then at a grinning Canary. "I'm going to find out what's going on, you know," he declared.

"Probably," Canary said. "In the meantime, Taylor has a list of other things we're going to need for Aisha."

"Fine, fine. Just a pack mule. I get it. You ready, Taylor?"

She closed her eyes and concentrated for a moment before nodding. "Hurry, don't know how long I can push them back."

He wrapped a hand around her waist, spun them both, and a moment later they appeared on the lap of a large granite Abraham Lincoln in front of two bus-loads of local school children who all started pointing at them and talking loudly while their chaperones stared in surprise.

"Oh, never mind us," Harry told the excited crowd as he removed his staff from his pocket. "Nothing to see here. Just two super-awesome teenaged capes out for an afternoon of fun and chaos."

"So much for incognito," Taylor muttered darkly.

"Eh, I'll just cast a Notice-Me-Not, it'll be fine." She climbed on behind him just as the first park rangers arrived, and to the shouted delight of the children the two of them soared on his staff over the heads of the assembled tourists and into the park beyond.

He cast his Notice-Me-Not and almost immediately people stopped pointing.

"Why there?" Taylor asked.

"I've never been to DC, it's the only place I could remember clearly," he said. "Point me National Zoo."

His magic pointed the way and he banked sharply to follow, aware of Taylor's arms around his waist. The zoo looked pretty obvious when they reached it. The two descended together, landing on a path near one of the display buildings, while Harry stored his staff. Still under the masking magic, he cast glamours on Taylor and himself before letting the Notice Me Not charm fade.

"And we're here," he said with a grin.

Taylor looked around with interest. "I haven't been here since I was little," she said, nostalgia thick in her voice. "Dad was in town for a DWA meeting with the New Hampshire senator about a labor bill they were pushing. Mom brought me here."

Harry found himself staring at her wistful expression and felt utterly torn. He wanted so badly to take her hand and just walk through the zoo with her, looking at all the exhibits as if it were just a happy day together. But there was a little girl back in Brockton Bay who desperately needed their help.

With a deep sigh, Taylor seemed to arrive at the same conclusion. "We need to get moving. Do you know where the armadillo is?"

Harry cast another point me spell. As luck would have it, they landed relatively close and made their way to the small mammal exhibit. Give the beautiful spring weather, it wasn't surprising that they had to make their way through busloads of tourists and school field trips. Finally, though, they reached the exhibits and made their way through casually until they reached the enclosure that held, among other animals, a pair of three-banded armadillos.

"So, what do you need to do, just take it?" Taylor asked.

"I just need some of its bile."

She stared. "Bile, Harry? Really?"

He shrugged. "Again, no dragon's blood. I'm having to make a magic potion without any magical ingredients."

"Okay, I'll bite. How do you extract armadillo bile?"

"Magically, of course."

Harry cast a strong notice-me-not before removing his staff and, at a touch, vanishing the class wall of the enclosure. One of the giant furry rat-things that shared the armadillo area tried running off, but Taylor caught it easily, causing it to squeal in alarm.

Harry, meanwhile, removed a vial from his pocket, waved his staff over the oblivious armadillo, and cast the extraction charm. The poor animal rolled onto its back and made pitiful little coughing sounds as a miniscule stream of green, foul-smelling fluid spilled up and out of its mouth and into the vial.

A moment later Harry had two ounces. He capped the vial and put it back before storing his staff. At his nod Taylor put the big rodent back into the enclosure and he restored the glass before dropping the notice-me-not charm.

"Botanical garden next," he said.

"Right, should be close."

As they were leaving the building Taylor saw an advertisement and froze. When Harry didn't notice she grabbed his hand and forcibly pulled him back. "We're going there."

"But…Dinah…"

"This is important, Harry."

"They're just spiders!"

"Those are Darwin Bark Spiders. The only ones in all of North America. Strongest silk in the world—tensile strength better than Kevlar. I want them. What the hell point is there to being a villain if we can't get them?"

He stepped closer, noticing that they were getting some attention. "I'll make you a deal," he said softly. "We help Dinah first, then when she's well and home I'll prepare your spider city for you. And when you have an environment set up for them, I'll bring you back. Deal?"

She looked longingly back at the spiders before nodding. "Deal."


	27. Interlude: The Amy Dallon Diaries

A/N: Chap 26 review responses are in my forums as normal. Also, Trigger warning-Amy angst and MILF jokes ahead.

* * *

 **Interlude: The Amy Dallon Diaries**

Amy Dallon sat under one of the cherry blossom trees that lined Arcadia High School during lunch, having escaped calculus with a desperate need not to answer any more questions about how her sister was. The whole world seemed to know that the supervillain Skitter came close to killing Glory Girl.

Worse, Amy knew intrinsically that all those asking were Vicki's friends, not hers. Without Vicki there, she had no friends in Arcadia at all. So, she took her hummus-and vegetable sandwich, potato chips and tea out onto the grounds and sat with her head resting in her hands, more tired than hungry.

She hadn't slept at all in the past two nights—all she could see whenever she closed her eyes was Vicky's swollen face; all she could hear was the rattling sound of her final breaths.

She'd managed to heal her in time, and in actuality Vicky was back home recuperating from the horrifying experience. Both girls had made a vow that Skitter was going to die for what she did, even if it ended up putting either or even both of them in the Birdcage. She could almost imagine Skitter's flesh in her hands, shaping it into a monstrosity that would drive the girl insane from unending agony and…

" _So, Amy, you want to know who your daddy is?"_

That bitch Tattletale's voice rang in Amy's head like a clarion bell. The conversation she had with Tattletale and Skitter in the bank when she found herself a hostage to the Undersiders, when Tattletale was trying to talk her way out of Glory Girl beating them all to paste, came back without warning.

" _I'll make you a deal, Glory Hole,"_ Tattletale had said with that smug grin on her face _. "You go in the vault, lock yourself in, and I don't speak on the subject. I won't say the one sentence that tears your family apart."_

 _Vicki stood her ground, just like she always did. "I can't do that. I'm calling your bluff, and if I'm wrong, I'll face the consequences of whatever you say."_

" _Very principled. Very self-involved too, that you think the secret and the consequences have to do with you and your overzealous nature. They don't. They have to do with her."_ Tattletale didn't even look at Amy; talking as if she weren't there. _"You won't be tickled pink, either, but the aftermath would be hers to deal with. Humiliation, shame, heartbreak."_

Tattletale knew. Somehow, the bitch just _knew_. The fact that her father was a supervillain was bad enough, but that Tattletale somehow knew…

"Hey, you going to eat those crisps?"

"Dennis, I told you I want to be alone," Amy said without lifting her head.

"Dennis? That's the ginger, right?"

 _Wait. British accent. Slightly nasal with a hint of a deviated septum._ She looked up, eyes widened in shock, to see Harry Bailey sitting next to her in jeans and a T-shirt with a picture of an Aryan Jesus holding up a hand as if to make a point, under which was the subtitle, " _I NEVER SAID THAT."_

"Mage," she hissed.

"Yep, that's me. So, are you?"

She scrambled to her feet and pulled her phone from her pocket. "Am I what?"

"Going to eat your crisps?" She noticed her had a cafeteria paper plate loaded with almost six slices of the school cafeteria pizza, with a Super-Duper-Gulp on the grass beside him. At a glance, he could almost look like any other student.

"What are you doing here?" she demanded as she reached for her phone.

"Missed the pizza," he said with a very full mouth.

She pushed the programmed number for the PRT. _"PRT Control Board, this is Tattletale. How may I block your call?"_

Amy frowned and stared at her phone for a moment. "Who is this?"

" _This is Tattletale. How may I block your call?"_

She threw the phone down in disgust while Harry cackled. "Yeah, won't lie, she's been grinning about hacking the PRT phone system all day. Made her almost unbearable."

"We're going to get you!" Amy declared hotly. "Glory Girl is going to pound every one of you into a pulp. How'd you like everything you eat to taste like bile? To see everything in purple, or to shit through your mouth!"

"I'd say that's a typical Sunday morning," Harry muttered as he scarfed down another slice of pizza. "I'm here. Not fighting or anything. All you have to do is touch, right? Well, go ahead. Won't stop you, but…"

She lunged forward, slapped his face and put him to sleep. As he slumped over, his body shimmered and faded into a back pack. There was no sign of the pizza.

"Well shit, I have to admit I wasn't expecting that. Well, okay, maybe I was, since I fooled you with illusions and transfiguration, but for some reason I thought you'd actually listen. You're pretty high strung, aren't you?" Mage was sitting casually in the tree above Amy's reach, legs looped over the branches, in full costume. "Wouldn't mind some pizza, though. It was pretty good here."

"Why are you doing this?" Amy demanded, torn between anger and despair. "Just leave me alone!"

"I'm not stopping you." He didn't sound threatening at all. In fact, he sounded almost like a British version of Gallant when he was trying to be nice. "Wouldn't try. You could turn and walk away any time. I won't even take your crisps, promise. But before you go, you should know that we saved Dinah Alcott from Coil. You know, the mayor's niece? She's twelve. Suffering pretty bad withdrawal symptoms. We were hoping you could help her."

"Addiction is mostly in the brain and…"

"You don't do brains. Yeah, got it. Actually I have a potion that will take care of that. What I was hoping for was for you to heal up the rest of her, and then maybe just make sure the potion worked. Restoration potions usually require magical mandrake and dragon's blood, and so I had to do some substitution."

She ignored everything he'd said after she heard 'mayor's niece'. She knew about Dinah Alcott because she was Triumph's first cousin, and he'd been worried sick about her ever since Coven made the accusation that Coil had kidnapped her.

"And then what?" she asked, thinking quickly.

"Then I give you a charmed object called a portkey that will teleport you and Dinah to the PRT headquarters and you can have the credit for saving her from us."

That…was not what she was expecting. "What?"

Mage shrugged before hopping lightly out of the tree. To her surprise, he took the mask off with a wry smile.

"Only reason I wear the bloody thing is to keep bugs out of my face when I fly. Look, Amy, I know you don't believe me, but back before all this shit happened, I really was just trying to be a friend. You looked lonely, and I _was_ lonely. But that's neither here nor there. Fact remains that I don't care about brownie points with a PRT that knows for a fact Coven is innocent of our crimes but still treats us like criminals. All I care about is that a twelve-year-old girl is hurting, and I want to make it better. Please, will you help us?"

Amy studied him for the longest time. Something about his sincerity reminded her of Gallant—as if he wanted her to trust him. She didn't, but she could see him making a genuine effort. The problem was that he and his partner nearly killed her sister.

"Bring her to a public place," she proposed. "Glory Girl and I will come, and if what you say is true I'll heal her."

"Oh, that wouldn't be a trap at all, would it?" he muttered, frowning slightly. "Not like your sister is a bit of a psycho at all, is she? Granted, she's a bloody hot psycho, but still a psycho. I know the two of you think it's okay to break your word or the rules because you're heroes. I want to trust you, but it's hard when I know you'll happily break your word to me and sleep the sleep of the just. So…how 'bout this."

He held out a hand, and as she watched a simple plastic baton appeared.

"This is a portkey," he said. "It's charmed to teleport whoever is holding it to a specific location. I promise you it will be public, not our hideout, but that way you won't have a trap set up. You can bring as many people as you can have grab it, if you want. All of New Wave. Hell, even Alexandria. Don't care. Dinah will be waiting."

"What if it's a trap?"

Harry rolled his eyes. He hopped easily out of the tree, turned and with a gesture, a five-foot-long wood and silver staff shot out of a two-inch deep pouch on his waist. He pointed it at the cherry tree and abruptly the tree exploded. No, it vaporized. It disintegrated so thoroughly all that remained were shards of bark and saw dust. The heat and force of it caused Amy to stumble and fall onto her rear in the grass. She glanced quickly over her shoulder and saw the explosion raised alarms from the school. Two of the Wards who had been hanging by the doors (probably just to keep an eye out on her) ran inside.

"Amy, don't you get it?" Mage asked. Now he sounded positively angry. "I don't need to trap you. You, or Glory Girl, or any of New Wave. The fact I don't fight you isn't because you scare me. It's because I _don't fucking want to fight you._ Get it?

He tossed the portkey on the grass. "It'll activate in an hour. Please come. Bring whoever you want. Please."

He spun and disappeared. Given his penchant for illusions, Amy waited for the tree to shimmer back to its original state.

It never did.

~~Simurgh's Son~~

~~Simurgh's Son~~

There was little point in keeping the incident from the PRT, given that Clockblocker and Gallant arrived within minutes from the school in full costume. Gallant was already on his phone making the report. Evidently Tattletale didn't bother intercepting his call.

"You okay?" Clockblocker asked Amy when he arrived.

She nodded. "Fine. He never came too close, the tree was just a point I guess."

"Helluva point," he said as he walked to the stump. "This was…shit. Takes some power to do this. What was the point?"

"He wants me to heal Dinah Alcott. Coven has her."

"Yeah, pretty sure Piggot wouldn't go for that," he said.

Amy shrugged. "If I were a Ward I might care."

Brandish arrived just a minute before Miss Militia, less than ten minutes after the Wards. Miss Militia brought a cadre of PRT troops and forensic specialists who started analyzing the tree to try and get a read on Mage's frustratingly varied power set. No one believed his claims of 'magic'.

"Absolutely not," Brandish declared when Amy finally explained what Mage was after. "It's obviously a trap, or else why not release her immediately? Amy, where is that thing?"

Amy held up the plastic baton. "Mage said it would activate in an hour."

"Not if I have anything to say about it," Brandish declared. "Hand it over."

Amy complied. Knowing Mage, it should not have surprised her that the moment her mother and she were both touching it, their hands locked to it and the whole world spun wildly around them. She could hear her mother screaming, and felt a shrill scream of her own bubbling up, until abruptly they found themselves on the deck of one of the rusted hulks that dominated the boat graveyard in the middle of Brockton Bay.

"Holy Mary Mother of God, you are so…not a naked Glory Girl."

Mage's declaration came from her right, but her mother's cursing and rage came from her left, and for a second Amy was torn which to look at first. Finally, though, her mother's rage caught her attention and she found herself looking at a very naked Carol Dallon.

A deep shame gripped Amy's heart when she realized that she found her adopted mother as beautiful as Mage obviously did.

With a slash of her hand Carol summoned an arcing blade of hard light that Amy knew from experience could cut a building in two. Mage held up a staff, creating his own shield that intercepted it without apparent effort. "Man, Amy, even I never realized your mom was such a MILF! Look at her chest bounce!"

"You fucking bastard!" Carol slashed again and again; behind Mage the boat began the break apart as he continued to shield against her blows, until the baton spun out of Amy's hands and slammed into Carol's back. Abruptly she was gone.

"Wow," Mage said. "You know, Amy, when I accidentally forgot to include clothes in the portkey for a second rider, I was really, really hoping Glory Girl would come with you. Although, if you'd brought Alexandria, that would have been fun too. But you know what? Your mom worked just fine."

"You're a sexist pig," Amy snarled. "Where is she? Where'd you send her?"

"Er…" Mage scratched the back of his neck. "Might have sent her to the public lobby of PRT headquarters."

Amy thought of her mom, standing naked and cursing in the middle of PRT headquarters. She thought of her mom, who'd raised her without ever giving her a single hug, standing in the midst of staring eyes and pointing fingers, and suddenly the sheer absurdity of it left her collapsed and laughing on the rusted deck of the ship.

She wasn't sure when the tears started, but she kept laughing anyway.

"Harry, you ass, I think you broke her."

"Ow! Shit, Skitter, stop hitting me!"

"Stop being a sexist shit, then! Did you really rig it to take off Glory Girl's clothes?"

"Er, maybe? Ow! Stop it! I'm a fucking sixteen-year-old super-villain raised by supervillains, and Brandish tried to kill me! She hit me with her power so hard Armsmaster was about to arrest her for murder. What do you expect? It's not like I actually want to hurt any of them."

Amy looked up through teary eyes to see Skitter slapping the back of Mage's head again.

"Just when I start to think you aren't a complete, utter jerk you do shit like that!" the villain declared.

"You almost killed my sister," Amy said, staring at Skitter.

Skitter froze, slowly turning her creepy, insectoid mask toward Amy.

"Yes, I did." Her voice sounded odd, multitudinous, until Amy realized she was echoing through her bugs. "And it scared the hell out of me. I was trying to slow her down—Tattletale explained later what actually happened. I didn't mean to hurt her because I honestly didn't think it was possible. I'm sorry."

As Amy looked, two more women emerged onto the deck from the long-abandoned wheelhouse of the ship. She recognized Tattletale with a surge of hatred, and from her bright yellow and feathered-hair she guessed the second woman was Canary. In Canary's arms hung a thin, wasted little girl.

"I gave her the restoration potion a few minutes ago," Mage said simply. "My promise stands, Amy. Heal her, and I'll get you both back to PRT headquarters. Whatever you want."

"All of you naked in the PRT lobby?"

"NO!"

All three of the female Coven members shouted at once, and yet still couldn't drown out Mage's howled. "YES!"

Amy chuckled, though it felt more tired and border-line hysterical than humorous. "Never mind, Mage would get more out of it than I would."

"Hell, you could come too!" Mage said eagerly.

Taylor slapped the back of his head hard enough that his mask fell off. Amy just shook her head and looked at the little girl in Canary's arms. There was no good reason _not_ to heal her. "Put her down," she said.

Canary complied without a word. As she did so, Canary gently moved a strand of Dinah's hair from her face much like Carol would often do for Vicky with they were younger. Never Amy, though. Never Amy.

"This is my price," she said, finally deciding. She turned to stare at Tattletale. "Who am I?"

The members of Coven shuffled uncomfortably for a moment before Tattletale spoke.

"Your real name is Amelia Claire Lavere. Your father was Marquis; your mother was Claire Gauthier, a French national who immigrated after the Simurgh attached Nice. She was killed by the Allfather when you were a baby. Three years later, Marquis allowed himself to be captured rather than risk you being hurt. He loved you so much he sacrificed himself to keep you safe."

Amy slumped back to the deck of the ship a few feet from the unconscious girl. "How did you know?"

"Public record," Tattletale confessed. "Taking down Marquis made New Wave's reputation. The timing fit."

"And the rest? What you threatened me with?"

Tattletale shrugged, though at least she wasn't grinning. "I could see it in your eyes when you looked at her. After all, she's not really your sister, is she? I imagine it would have been harder _not_ to fall in love with her given her aura. You feel all this shame, but you shouldn't. None of it's your fault."

Amy sobbed again as the terrible weight of that truth settled on her shoulders. With tears in her eyes, she took the little girl's hands. It wasn't a surprise that whatever Mage did with his bullshit powers worked—the chemical balance of Dinah's brain had somehow been reset to a point before the drugs affected her neural transmitters and receptors. It was a simple matter to flush the rest of the chemicals from her body and to steal what limited fat stores she had to restore atrophied muscles.

"She'll need to eat a lot more for the next month or two," Amy said. "Now get me back."

"Before you go, I'd like you to consider something," Tattletale said. She again wasn't smiling. "You're a villain's daughter, but you were raised by heroes. You, though, don't have to be either. You're almost eighteen, Amy. Who do you want to be? What do you want to be? Think about it. You could open your own clinic. Offer fifteen slots a day, five days a week. Fourteen of which are to be filled with nominated patients from around the country, to be selected by an anonymous selection committee made up of physicians around the country. The fifteenth slot each work day will be open to anyone with no criminal record for, say, half a million dollars. More importantly, it would allow you to have a life."

"What are you talking about?" Amy demanded.

"You'll have to have contracts in place with the PRT for a discounted rate for hero capes, of course," Tattletale continued without pause. "Otherwise you'd be able to help hundreds of deserving people every month from around the country while still earning two and a half million a week to either donate to a good cause or otherwise live comfortably. It would be independence, Amy. You would officially be a Rogue, but a Rogue that heals people. You would be your own woman, living your own life. And for one of those adjusted contracts, Harry would be willing to place the same level of protection around your clinic that we have at our lair. A lair which, according to him, could survive a nuke. Think about it."

Tattletale stood, nodded to Harry over Amy's shoulder, and before she could say anything the world spun around her until she, and Dinah Alcott, found themselves in the lobby of the PRT headquarter building.

~~Simurgh's Son~~

~~Simurgh's Son~~

Mother was _still_ yelling. Amy sat in a waiting room down the hall from the conference room with her Vicky and her cousins, Crystal and Eric Pelham. It did not help anything at all that Eric showed up with the rest of New Wave fighting unsuccessful to stifle the giggles.

The little shit.

"Stop it, dickwad," Crystal muttered. They were trying very hard to present a unified front to the Protectorate, since several Wards were in the conference room while Armsmaster and Piggot "met" with Brandish and Flashbang.

"Sorry." Eric was a bit of a dick, Amy thought, but he wasn't a bad person, and he at least had the brain to realize he should not have been laughing.

It just wasn't enough to actually keep him from laughing.

"You know, she did try to kill him," Eric pointed out. "I mean, think about it. We had him in foam, and she hit him full in the face with enough hard light to take the head off a Brute 5. She hasn't exactly made him a friend."

"Are you fucking defending him?" Crystal asked, eyes wide.

"No, no!" Eric held up both hands. "I get it, it was a shitty thing to do and totally embarrassing. I know I'd be embarrassed. But it's not like he unmasked her, we're all publicly known. And instead of trying to kill her back, like most villains would do, he chose to embarrass her."

"And perv over her," Amy pointed out.

Eric shrugged. "Sorry, but Aunt Carol is pretty hot."

He made no effort to defend himself when Crystal slapped the back of his head. Across the room, some of the Wards snickered.

Amy dismissed them all. Her mind swirled around what she'd heard on that ship.

Every day she woke up, ate and went to school. Every day after school she volunteered at one of the area hospitals until bed time. Weekends she spent volunteering twelve hours a day. She was so exhausted that she had lost track of what it felt like not to be exhausted. However, an irritating little voice in her head was demanding to know why she was doing what she was doing. Was all the volunteer time at the hospital because she loved healing people?

If she were honest, the answer was no. She was actually beginning to resent and hate her power, and the feeling of obligation to use it for everyone's benefit but her own. The fact she now knew her father was one of the most notorious supervillains in history made it even worse.

So why did she work so hard?

 _Because you don't want to go home._ The revelation almost blinded her. All thought ended and her vision narrowed down to a singular point as the realization sunk in. She worked 12 hour days because even the exhaustion and resentment was better than a home that had never truly belonged to her.

All the years she'd noticed how Carol wouldn't meet her eyes finally sunk in and made sense. Carol Dallon didn't like Amy because Amy was a reminder of one of their worst enemies. She'd taken Amy in as a charity, but nothing more. If not for Vicki, she'd have nothing. And now that she admitted to herself what her feelings really were for her adopted sister, she knew that was a heart-breaking dead end as well.

"Where are you going?"

Amy hadn't even realized she was moving when Crystal spoke.

"I…I'm going to…" She turned to the Wards—Gallant was nearby. He was staring at her with concern and curiosity. No doubt he'd sensed her epiphany. "Is there any chance I could speak to Miss Militia?" Amy asked.

She could see Gallant's eyes behind his visor. He wore a gunmetal suit of tinker-made armor, but she knew he was no more a tinker than she was. She also began to realize why he paid so much attention to her while dating her sister.

 _He knew. He knew her feelings for Glory Girl. More importantly, he probably suspected that it was Vicky's projected aura that caused it._

She hoped and prayed he wouldn't ask why, and for once he merely nodded and led her out of the waiting area outside the conference room and into the bowels of the PRT headquarters. Eventually, after an elevator ride and three long, easily defendable corridors, Gallant knocked on the open door of Miss Militia, the deputy leader of the Brockton Bay protectorate.

She looked up from a stack of forms with relief in her eyes, though of course her face was covered in her stars-and-stripes bandana. "Gallant. Panacea? What can I do for you?"

"I asked to see you. I wanted to ask you a question in private, if possible."

"Of course," Miss Militia said with professional courtesy. "Gallant, can you excuse us?"

Gallant nodded and left without comment. Panacea stepped all the way into the office before closing the door. She considered the older woman carefully before realizing there was no good way to phrase what she wanted to say.

"I wanted to know if it was possible to speak to a prisoner in the Birdcage. I'd like to speak to my birth father—Marquis."


	28. Escalation 6

A/N: Review responses for the previous chapter are in my forums like normal. I now present you with...a nice, quiet, restful chapter. But next week...the Merchants.

* * *

 **Escalation 3.6**

Taylor was streaming the news on her computer on the second morning after they healed and freed Dinah Alcott. Overnight Lung had appeared with Oni-Lee and the few surviving members of the ABB and attacked an E88 drug den that the white supremacist group had established in former ABB territory.

E88 capes might have been unmasked, but none were actually captured. Taylor had no doubt there would be reprisals.

"He did it in revenge."

Taylor looked up from her computer to find Tattletale at her door. Harry was across the alley, working on a ward stone for her future botanical garden.

"What do you mean?"

"Brandish. He tried to make it totally about being a pervy teen, and that definitely played a part in it, but his motivation was to hurt her without actually hurting her. Harry was mad at her for trying to kill him in captivity. And…and I think he was mad at her for being such a shitty mother to Panacea."

Taylor crossed her arms. "He was expecting Glory Girl."

Lisa snorted. "No he wasn't. That was just the excuse. He knew she was still recovering."

"It was still a shitty, sexist thing to do. If it had been Manpower…"

"He'd have done something equally embarrassing," Tattletale assured her. "And when Panacea suggested making amends being showing up naked ourselves, Harry wasn't joking. He'd have gladly gone buff to see us."

"Lisa, that doesn't make me feel any better about it."

She shrugged. "If he ever tries it with me I'm going to reduce him to a puddle on the floor," she said. "But in his mind Brandish is an enemy that he couldn't fight directly. Not saying it's right or wrong—my whole sense of ethics is pretty fucked anyway. Just saying there's two sides to every story, and Harry himself doesn't always understand his motivation. But I will tell you this—he might have joked about her body to further embarrass and enrage her, but there was no actual attraction. He finds her to be a repulsive person—he acted to hurt her in the only way available to him because she was his enemy. And if he feels guilty about anything, it's because he upset _you_."

With that, Lisa turned and went looking for Aisha. Brian's sister was proving to be a pain in the butt, but her potential was pretty astonishing.

Taylor could tell Harry was working on the floor of the other warehouse. She'd tagged him with a few flies just to keep an 'eye' out on him. He'd not said anything that morning after Taylor verbally ripped him a new one for what she viewed as a vicious, sexist attack on women in general.

The fact that it was not so much an attack on women in general as one women in particular didn't make her feel any better about it, but she knew that wasn't the point Tattletale was trying to make. Her point was that Harry wasn't a sexist pig (or at least, not _just_ a sexist pig), he was a surprisingly vicious enemy. He used the veil of sexism as an effective weapon against an opponent.

It actually reminded Taylor of the fact that Lung lost his genitals briefly because of how she fought him. Granted, they'd regenerate, but it definitely put Lung in a bad place for a while.

She stood and stretched her back. It was Canary's turn to cook that morning, and Taylor had to admit the woman had a way with food. Crepes and eggs with sausage scrambled in. She'd been on her computer ever since and saw it was fast approaching lunch.

The day-to-day affairs of the villain gang Coven would likely have surprised most with just how boring it was. Harry, for instance, started his morning by transfiguring twenty barrels of filtered water (filtered through a system he transfigured) into wine. He then poured them into five gallon plastic jugs like what most offices used in water dispensers and sold each for $200 to local area bars and restaurants on the down-low. The eateries were pleased enough that they paid in cash without asking questions, netting Harry almost two thousand dollars a day just from filtered water and a touch of magic.

Lisa spent her morning day-trading. Some days were better than others, but so far she averaged $50,000 a week in an effort to stay under some vaguely defined threshold that would bring her to the attention of Wall Street Thinkers.

Aisha was _supposed_ to spend her morning in the new online high school program Lisa had enrolled her in. Harry transfigured some special tinted glasses that helped the dyslexia and was supposedly working on a potion that might help the worst of her ADHD. In reality, she was playing some video game with Jess.

Canary was finishing up in the communal kitchen downstairs, singing softly to herself as she worked. They'd ordered the equipment to make a recording studio for her, but it hadn't arrived and they didn't have any musicians for her to record with. Canary herself was fairly solid on piano or keyboards, but would need a whole band to record.

Harry was laying on his stomach, as he'd been for the past six hours, working on something Taylor asked for next door.

Taylor gathered all of this information in a single moment, absorbing it from her bugs without conscious effort. She stood and left her room and hopped down stairs to the kitchen and communal living area. The television on the far wall was on a PBS opera performance of all things, which Canary was humming along to in perfect tune.

"Hello, Taylor," she said with a kind smile.

"Hey. I'm going to go check on Harry. He owes me some spiders."

Canary grinned. "Still mad at him?"

"Aren't you?"

"I've had girls do much worse to me," she said. "Especially after I triggered and had feathers in my hair. I'm sure he understands that's not a tactic we'll condone in the future."

She continued with her assigned chores that day, leaving Taylor to her thoughts as she slipped out of the side door to the warehouse across from her. Just as her bugs informed her, she found Harry transferring runes onto the floor from a paper template. It didn't look as complex as what he did for their main lair and even with only six hours it looked as if he were almost done.

"How's it coming?" she asked.

"Fine," he said. He sounded wary. Their last fight had not ended well.

She came around and sat by the circle. She noticed he was hovering just above it, rather than laying on the ground. "Harry, look. I'm not going to tell you I'm sorry for shouting at you yesterday, because what you did just really pissed me off. It was too much like what Hess and her bullies did. But I do forgive you, okay? Because that's what friends do, right?"

"I thought friends didn't let friends drive drunk or something," he muttered. Taylor could see the corner of his lips twitch, though, and knew he'd accepted her forgiveness.

He finished the last rune and stood up with a pop-of his back. "'Kay. This one isn't going to be as strong as ours. No direct nukes, though it'd probably be stronger than any Endbringer shelter in town. You ready?"

Taylor nodded, unable to help the surge of excitement. He sat cross legged on the stone circle, just as he had with their lair, and let his staff float in front of him. As he began chanting, the stone lit up and sank down below just like before, all the way to the bedrock. He explained that wardstones of this kind must be set in bedrock. Fortunately in this case, even the difference of half a block meant the bedrock was closer to the surface than their original lair. The stone only had to sink fifteen feet to reach bedrock.

Her breath caught in her throat as the magic flowed across the floor and up the walls, not just repairing but actually changing everything in its wake. Aluminum walls turned into a transparent material, casting the entire space into a light that seemed somehow purer and brighter than mere sunlight.

Blocks rose from the cement floor, forming perfect planter boxes. Soil collected from the debris and trash, and somehow seeds as well, until trees and shrubs appeared, reaching up like grasping hands toward the light. In the far back she saw the long-abandoned business office rise up onto a second level that spanned the back of the garden, with more planter boxes dominating most of the second level, while leaving the lower level under shade. Perfect, she thought, for spiders.

A few minutes later, Harry stumbled up from the basement, exhausted. "Done," he said. "Gonna go shower and nap."

He started walking past her when she impulsively caught his arm. "Harry!"

He paused, looking back with a blank expression.

Her brief impulse to kiss him died. "Thank you," she said instead.

He nodded and then continued walking away.

~~Simurgh's Son~~

~~Simurgh's Son~~

"That's…a rather extraordinary plan of action, Ms. Dallon."

"Call me Amelia, please." She sat across the table from Rachel Payne, who was a senior partner in the small firm of Causen, Payne and Angest. Even if Amelia hadn't heard good things about their work, she might have picked them just because of their name. They were all obviously born to be lawyers together.

"I take it Carol isn't aware of your intent?"

Of course, Rachel Payne knew Carol Dallon. The legal community of Brockton Bay was a self-enclosed community, since the presence of so many criminal gangs made it an unpleasant place to live except for those emotionally tied to it.

"If she did, I'd be contacting their firm," Amelia said. "I do not intend to remain a member of New Wave. I've…recently had an epiphany regarding my life. My past, my future. I've realized why I've been living the life I have, and why I've been miserable through most of it. I believe this course of action is most desirable."

"Well, you turn eighteen in a week, so there would be no problem in starting. Do you have enough to pay our retainer?"

"I have three hundred dollars," Amy confessed. "But I'll be a millionaire before the end of the year. I'll give you what I have now for the retainer, but go ahead and prepare your invoices against a future date when I start bringing income in."

"You must understand there's a risk the PRT may attempt to regulate you," Rachel warned. "Not to mention the Department of Health and Human Services. There are quite a few rules and licensing requirements for care centers. Granted, some extenuating circumstances exist because of your parahuman abilities under Federal law, but we're going to have to do some fast talking with important people."

Amelia shrugged. "Offer to let the DHHS draft rules and guidelines over how my _pro bono_ patients are selected. And let the PRT know I would give them preferred client status at steeply discounted rates for capes or those injured in the line of duty. Any Endbringer duty would be pro-bono, of course. And let them both know that if they don't make it happen, I will stop healing. Period."

Rachel frowned, but it was an expression of deep thought rather than disapproval. "That…might help. After all, this won't be a clinic or hospital, but a parahuman healing center. You have to understand that Carol _will_ find out. Probably within an hour of my first phone call to Concord."

"I plan to speak to them this evening," Amy said. "I'd like to have as much set up as possible by my birthday. I…I have a feeling I won't be welcome in the Dallon home after that."

"Will you be okay?"

Amelia Lavere forced a smile for her new attorney. "I will be."

~~Simurgh's Son~~

~~Simurgh's Son~~

"You owe me spiders," Taylor told Harry the next day.

It was his turn to make breakfast, which meant fried eggs, a slab of bacon, baked beans and toast. It was pretty much the only breakfast he could cook. Of course, the dishes were very conveniently rinsing themselves before flying into the industrial-sized dishwasher Lisa purchased. Taylor wanted to institute a no powers rule until Jess pointed out that she used her bugs to move things all the time.

"Okay. DC again, then?"

"Yeah. And…" She paused and cleared her throat. "I want to make a day of it, like you promised. We explore the zoo. The gardens. The Smithsonian. Stuff I haven't had a chance to do."

Harry blinked at her, caught off guard by the sincerity of the request. "So, tour the city, then steal shit?"

She considered before nodding. "That's about right."

He looked her up and down, but not with his pervy expression. He was simply assessing readiness, and realized with that glance she was already set. "Okay," he said simply, almost smiling. "I do owe you spiders. Where do you want to go first?"

"The shaded spot next to the Small Mammal exhibit would be perfect," Taylor said.

Harry stepped out from behind the kitchen counter and offered his arm. Taylor closed her eyes to push back her power before taking it. Teleportation still sucked, but it was a hell of a lot better once Lisa explained why it was making them sick.

A moment later, they found themselves in the National Zoo in Washington, DC. Harry performed simple glamours and the two began their walking tour of the zoo. They bought lunch from a café in the zoo and bought a stuffed Panda for Lisa, who despite vehement denials still slept with stuffed animals when she had a chance.

He bought her orange cream popsicles which they ate as they walked toward the new Darwin Bark Spider enclosure in the Amazonia exhibit.

"Which is odd because they're actually from Madagascar," Taylor was explaining as they walked through the area looking at birds and small primates until they came to a netted enclosure with two large trees, each spanned by a dense looking network of webbing.

"So, is this a date?" Harry asked as they stared up looking for the spiders.

Taylor, concentrating on getting the two spiders to approach, momentarily lost her concentration as she turned to stare. "What?"

"Well, it feels like a date," Harry said quickly. "I mean, from what I've read. You know, we went to a zoo together, had lunch, bought sweets and now I'm going to sorta get you a gift. Would this count as a date?"

"I was thinking expedition, personally. We're here for materials as much as anything."

"So, not a date?"

"Why is it important?"

"Because expeditions are professional things, right? But dates…I could kiss you if it were a date, right? But you're still mad and all that and…"

Taylor discovered a wonderful way to shut Harry Bailey up. She leaned over and kissed him. She'd like to say it was a magical experience, but really his lips were a bit thin and both were a little sweaty from walking around the zoo. The first contact surprised him so much it took him a second to kiss her back.

It was her very first kiss, she realized with a shock, and looking at him she felt a strange surge of fear, as if she'd done it completely wrong.

"What?" she asked, afraid of the answer.

"So does that mean this _is_ a date?"

"God, you dork."

He grinned at her—no, smiled. He smiled at her, and then very deliberately leaned over and kissed her back, slow enough she could easily stop him if she wanted. She felt his hand rest softly on the small of her back.

The second kiss was much better than the first.

"Call it a working date," she decided when they parted.

"Um, there's a really big spider on your shoulder," Harry said, eyes wide.

This time Taylor grinned. "This one is Gracey." Another, smaller spider appeared on her left shoulder opposite the first. "And this one is George. Are you ready to go back?"

"Yeah. I um…I really liked kissing you and all, but would it be okay if we not while you have big-assed spiders on your shoulders? Please?"

"I'll think about it."

"Pretty please?"

"Take us home, Harry."

~~Simurgh's Son~~

~~Simurgh's Son~~

"Danny?"

Danny Hebert looked up to see Marcia at the door, looking a little nervous. "What's up?"

Danny had known Marcia, like most of the people at the DWA, for years. She started four years after he did, first as a temp in accounting, was brought on full time in admin, then moved into the senior office manager role for the entire association when old Marjory Braddock retired. She had become the glue that held the entire place together.

Unfortunately, like many of the others, she'd become nervous around him since he returned to work. His daughter, after all, was a cape. Not just a cape, but technically a villain. Her exploits were all over the news through the week following the attack on the Dock Worker's building—saving the Alcott girl and then leading an assault on the PRT itself against two of the Triumvirate members to free her teammate Mage.

His work space was a cramped little room in one of the three single-wide trailers the Association rented as temporary work space pending the insurance money to fix the building. Like most organizations in Brockton Bay, they took out a Parahuman Acts clause to cover damage caused by capes. It was mandatory coverage in places with three or more known capes.

It just took forever to get the money.

Marcia shut the door behind him and sat down in one of the two folding chairs that Danny used when interviewing workers for placement. "Merchants," she said.

Danny stiffened. "Here? Why? They've…"

"They tagged the building and stole some of our furniture," Marcia said. "A couple of the dockworkers tried to stop them, but…it was pretty bad. You know Lonny White? He's in the hospital now. Heard he'd pull through, but it was pretty bad."

"Damn. I guess we should call the BBPD and…"

"Danny, I hate to ask this, but what Tay…I mean, Skitter said, last week. About protecting us. Do you think she'd be willing to help?"

"Marcia, we should…" Danny stopped when he saw the way the hope faded. "You don't think the police will help?"

"My husband's on the Force, Danny. He said that the BBPD has given up on whole swathes of the city because of the capes. The PRT doesn't do shit to help them." She shook her head, and in that brief moment Danny saw how angry she was at the situation.

"We…we have some money in the slush fund," Marcia began. "Maybe…maybe we can hire them. You know, like some of the internationals hire capes for protection. Hell, I wouldn't be surprised if Magnate Shipping and the Seaboard rail lines chipped in."

"Marcia, they're villains!"

Marcia snorted. "That's your own daughter you're talking about, Danny. You and Annette raised her better than that. She's no more a villain than I am, she just got shafted. She and her whole gang. But you saw that they did for us! Mage took on Purity, for Christ's sake! Skitter evacuated us and gave us safe haven, wherever it was, until it was safe. I just think they could help. Think about it, please?"

She turned and left him to stare out the flimsy window out into the bay. After a moment of consideration, he reached for the old rotary dial phone they were using until they could get IT to set up a better system, and laboriously dialed a number he had memorized.

An old, gravelly voice answered. " _Perkins_."

"Bill, Danny Hebert. How are you?"

" _Been better, Hebert. Merchants tagged all my damned freight cars and broke into one of my warehouses. Clients lost half a mil in merchandise_."

Danny didn't bother hiding his sigh. "Yeah, they took some of our things from our building too. Look, I want this on the down low, but you know who my daughter is, right?"

" _Pretty much everybody in the city knows, Hebert."_ Perkins sarcasm was as dry as his martinis. _"You're lucky no one's taken a shot at you yet."_

"Purity did," Danny reminded him. "Marcia in our office had a thought, but I wanted to pass it by you first. Taylor's gang, Coven, is literally five blocks away from us. They've never tagged our property or actually done anything at all, except maybe sell wine without a license or permit. But they held off Purity and took on the PRT. Marcia was thinking maybe we pool our resources and maybe see about hiring them as a…private security."

" _You're talking protection racket, like Marquis used to run."_

"Actually, I was thinking about a formal contract and a negotiated price for services rendered," Danny said. "Like BP pulled with the King's Men, before Siberian ripped them apart and they reformed as the Queen's Men."

Danny could hear Perkins puffing on his cigar. " _You pass this by Barton over at Seaboard_?"

"Not yet. We're the big three left in the docks, but you've been around the longest. I trust you to say it's a bad idea or not."

" _Don't butter me up, Hebert. Too damned old for it. It's not a bad idea, though. You think they'd do it?"_

"You know, Bill, I think they might. In fact, I think they'd do a pretty damned good job of protecting the area, too."

"' _Kay. Look, Barton and I do lunch together. I'll talk to her about it. The old bird'll probably go for it, but we'll see. Talk to your girl first, though. Be silly to go through the effort only to have 'em say no."_

"I will, Bill. Thank you. Let me know how it goes."

Bill Perkins, age 70 and still working full time at Magnate Shipping, hung up without another word. Danny expected no less. He'd worked at Magnate for five years before moving over to the DWA to assume the head of hiring position. Perkins was not a nice man by any means, but he was smart, mostly fair, and he got things done. If he was on board, Danny had no doubt Belinda Barton from Seaboard Rail would be onboard too.

He left his cramped office and walked down the narrow hall to the last office in the trailer. He knocked once and when he heard the " _Come in, Hebert,"_ he knew Marcia had already gotten to the ear of Phil Lendy, Danny's boss and the president of the Dockworker's Association.

He stepped inside and saw Phil on the phone. He met Danny's eyes square. "No, he actually just walked in. You know Hebert, he gets his shit together before he bugs me about it. Yeah, yeah. I think so. Talk to the Grand Dame and see what she says. Right."

He hung up. "Marcia convinced you, huh?"

Danny shrugged. "When has she not? You good with the idea?"

"Those kids saved our lives, Danny," Phil said without the hint of a smile. "I think the idea of putting them on retainer is a damned good one. Talk to your girl, see if they're willing."

"I'll ask her."

"Good." Phil reached for one of the antacids he kept in a bowl on his desk like candy. "I know things have been tough on you since Annette died, Danny. But she's a good kid—you and Annette did right by her. She'll do the right thing."

"I know she will. Not always the thing I want, but she'll do what she thinks is right."

Phil shrugged. "Yeah, that's kids for you."

~~Simurgh's Son~~

~~Simurgh's Son~~

Danny couldn't say he understood everything Mage was able to do. The talk about spells and magic made his head spin. Instead, he rationalized it as just an exotically wide array of powers, like Eidolon.

Still, he couldn't deny how magical it seemed that he could reach into his wallet, remove the picture of Taylor and his wife before Annette died, and just by touching it see two warehouses that moments before didn't seem to exist.

More amazing was how vastly different the second warehouse looked from just two days ago. It now matched the first in its finished, brand-new appearance with white walls that looked more like marble than aluminum and steel. Moreover, the second warehouse had a _lot_ more windows—the whole east and west walls were lined with huge windows, as was the roof. It frankly looked more like a greenhouse than a warehouse. The skywalks connecting the two structures gave it all an incredibly professional and high-tech appearance.

Danny made his way to the second warehouse's wide double doors. Taylor and Mage both knew he was there—they always did.

The doors opened onto a hot, humid botanical garden. Termite mounds rose along one wall almost ten feet tall, while on the other side of the segmented floor he saw already tall trees bustling with ants and wasp nests.

The floor between was filled with bee-keeper hives and large chest-high terrariums filled with bugs. He walked through nervously, but also with the knowledge his daughter controlled every one of the millions of bugs he saw around them. This was his second time in the "Garden" as they called it, and he hadn't been bit yet.

The habitats continued through the entire floor of the warehouse, which seemed to be much longer on the inside than seemed possible from the outside. A second level easily fifteen feet up filled the back of the warehouse. That level held a small office area and Harry's actual garden. That was where Danny headed. The steep stairs took him up to the second level where he found his daughter and Harry on their knees planting.

"…basil?" Taylor was asking something, but Danny only got the end of it.

Harry shrugged. "Protection. From what I understand, the first potions didn't have any truly magical plants in them. It wasn't until Roman times that wizards and witches started incorporating true magical flora and fauna into their potions. Before that, a witch's garden was just like your typical kitchen garden. Hey, Mr. Hebert."

Danny looked about the many wooden framed plots of soil that filled the level. Overhead, sunlight shone down with just the slightest tint of blue. He felt somewhat enlivened by the brilliance of it. Every square had green. "You two've been busy."

"Canary helps too when Lisa doesn't have her doing admin work," Taylor said. She stood, wiped the soil from the knees of her yoga pants and removed her gloves. "So, Lisa said you might be coming by. Wanna get out of the humidity?"

"Sure."

The office on the east side of the second level held two comfortable-looking desks and hutches, filing cabinets and a detailed, hand-drawn map of the warehouse. Danny tried not to think of the fact that all his daughter's spiders were directly below him in the shade under the second level.

He saw a small personal refrigerator and a sink between the desks. He knew a bathroom occupied the far side. Taylor went to the desk in the middle of the room that was immaculate—no papers or drawings anywhere, a smartly positioned, very large computer monitor at one side that would allow her to sit facing the door without obstructing her features from any guests, and a comfortable ergonomic chair.

"Want anything to drink? We have water, tea, sodas."

"Water would be fine, thank you," Danny said.

The fridge seemed to open by itself, but he knew it was actually a switch in the wall she could control with her insects. One of the bottles fell to the floor from within the small fridge and rolled seemingly of its own accord to her feet under her desk.

She lifted it, wiped it down with a saniwipe, and handed it over.

"Thanks. So, er, how're your studies?"

"Coming along," she said as she met his gaze.

Danny remembered a time when she never looked at him—those terrible months between when Annette died and Taylor was locked in that god damned locker. Now she always met his gaze squarely, proudly. It stunned him to realize that his daughter was a stronger person than he was. Possibly even stronger than his wife.

"Do you know when you'll try to take your GED?"

There was no discussion about going back to school. That talk went nowhere, and the fact that she was still officially listed as an escaped convict made the question academic anyway.

She shrugged. "Eventually. Lisa has let me have her old study guides. Probably next year if not sooner."

"And Mage?"

"He took his two days ago. He said it was a joke because he could just remember the answers from his previous life."

That was another one of the many things about Mage that made Danny nervous. "So, you two seem to be getting along better."

Taylor shrugged, though Danny noted with more amusement than alarm a tint of red in her cheeks. "He can be decent went he tries. He can also be a complete jackass."

"Love to you too, sweetheart," Harry said as he stepped in. He blew Taylor a kiss. "Never mind me, just needed a bite to eat." He pulled an apple from the fridge, as well as a soda, and then walked back out.

Taylor rolled her eyes and sighed with exasperation before focusing again on her dad. "So, it's just after noon on a Thursday and you still have your tie on. I have a feeling this is more business than pleasure. And Lisa sort of predicted what the business might be. The DWA is looking for help with the Merchants, aren't you?"

Danny just shook his head. "That girl. Yes, we're looking for help, but not just the DWA. Magnate Shipping and Seaboard Rail are all willing to sign on as well. The police have as much as admitted they don't have the resources, and the PRT…"

"Doesn't care," Taylor summed up. "Yeah, we know that."

She stood and opened one of the closed cabinets of the hutch behind her to review several well organized trays of paper. She removed a small bundle of twelve pages and presented it to Danny to read.

"Wow," he muttered. It was a contract detailing services and fees.

"What it boils down to is that we'll agree to clean out a designated area of the city and maintain nominal control of it in return for a base retainer of $10,000 per month, inclusive of all expenses incurred. Minimum contract period is six months and does not cover Endbringer or other Class S threats, or acts of God. Lisa said there was some legal ambiguity regarding liability in the event we accidently kill anyone, but we'll try not to. Anyone we catch we'll turn over to the BBPD with any evidence gathered. On page four you'll note that we keep any cash contraband found. You have the option to extend the contract up to twenty-four months or go month-to-month. It can be terminated at any time by either party. The companies will hold Coven harmless for any action taken in pursuit of the agreed-upon outcomes. That's your copy, feel free to take it and review."

Danny frowned. "I was thinking this would be on the down-low. If it became known we openly contracted with a villain gang…"

"You'd be no different than Exxon paying off Moord Nag in Namibia," Taylor noted. "Or Shell contracting with a villain group in Alaska to hold off Russian capes. When it comes to capes, normal rules don't apply. Plus, we're more popular right now than the PRT."

"There's that," Danny had to admit. "I'll take this to the others. Will…would you like to come over for dinner tonight? I don't mind if any of your friends come too."

He expected her to say no—she usually did. This time, though, she gave him a slight smile. "Sure, Dad. I'll see you tonight."


	29. Escalation 7

A/N: Chap 28 review responses in my forums like normal. Now, Trigger Warnings: Public nudity and prehensile breasts.

* * *

 **Escalation 3.7**

Missy hated school. She was in the Sixth Grade at Captain Hill Middle School, one of the schools that fed into Arcadia. It was in one of the nicer neighborhoods of the city, though of course Missy didn't live anywhere near it. A PRT agent assigned as her "mom" drove her every morning and picked her up every day.

The school principal knew she was a Ward, of course. They knew the agent who acted as her chauffer and substitute mother was not related to her in any fashion, and for the most part they just left her alone. She did well enough in school—it bored her to tears, but she would rather do the work than have Piggy get on her case about grades again.

She had no friends. It was hard to make friends when she had no home to invite them over too, and was too busy on patrols to visit theirs. She wanted friends, rather badly, but forced herself to make do with her fellow Wards. Unfortunately, the only girl was Shadow Stalker, and she was not someone Misty would ever want to be friends with, even if she didn't know about what she did to Skitter or Hellhound.

She'd heard Aegis tell Gallant that he received confirmation that Shadow Stalker was actually back in prison. Not the Birdcage, just a standard prison with electrified walls so she couldn't escape. They were still hunting for AD Calvert; Aegis heard a rumor the man had sought shelter in Boston with the villain Accord.

Still, even two weeks later most of the PRT was still talking about Mage's escape.

Vista would have fought Coven if she had to—Legend and Alexandria were both there and she knew better than to openly revolt against either of them. She was glad she didn't have to, though. That was why she was sure Harry wasn't really a villain. He would much rather avoid a fight with the heroes than hurt anyone. And though she didn't dare admit it, having Brandish appear butt-naked in the middle of the lobby during public business hours was just too funny.

The lunch bell rang. Missy gathered her things into her bag and shuffled out with the rest of the kids to the cafeteria. Once she had her food, she shuffled along with the other kids in her class until she noticed a newcomer sitting alone at a table toward the back of the cafeteria. They didn't have much time for lunch, since the lunch periods were staggered for each grade.

Still, something about her seemed… _oh_.

Dinah Alcott.

Missy should have realized the mayor's niece was going to be in Middle School. After all, she was Missy's own age. She didn't realize she went to Captain's Hill, though.

 _And she's a certified pre-cog._ They saw each other only in passing for the two days Dinah spent at the PRT headquarters before her parents took her home to recuperate. It had only been two weeks, though, so Missy was surprised to see the girl back in school.

Still, she was the only other parahuman Missy's age, and the fact she was in school was too big a chance to pass up. She left her classmates and walked over to the table to sit.

"How are you?" She didn't go through the normal pleasantries. She'd almost forgotten out to make conversation with normal people.

She knew she was right to come when Dinah shrugged. "Panacea healed my body enough, I guess."

"Missy Biron." She offered her hand, which Dinah took hesitantly.

"Dinah Alcott."

"Why are you back in school so soon? I'd have begged a month off at least."

"Dad insisted I'd get over it all sooner if I got back to my normal routine. They just changed schools to be closer to my uncle's residence." Dinah said the words the same way Ms. Shore talked about social studies. Difference was Ms. Shore was a sixty-eight year old alcoholic who moved through life in a brandy-induced haze. Dinah just had no feeling left.

Still, Missy liked the fact Dinah didn't come out and say her uncle was the mayor. She probably wouldn't ever come out and talk about being one of the most powerful pre-cogs on the planet either. Dinah just didn't seem like that type of girl.

Missy found herself very much wanting to be her friend.

"Can I ask you something?" Dinah said as she ate. She had a huge tray of food, but having been healed by Panacea before Missy understood why.

"Sure?"

"If…I mean…could you get me to Mage?"

"No one can find his lair," Missy said. She actually giggled. "Alexandria scoured the city for three straight days looking for them. She knew they were somewhere in the docks. She even had some of Skitter's family friends interrogated, but no one could remember where they were. It's protected like magic."

Dinah smiled weakly. "It is magic. He's a wizard."

Just like that, Missy accepted it without blinking an eye. "It'd make sense, all the things he can do. It was Skitter who saved you, though, right?"

Dinah nodded. "Skitter, Genesis and Tattletale saved me, then Canary talked to Coil's soldiers and made them help free Harry. Canary was very nice, she even sang for me a little. It'll be the safest place."

She didn't say what it would be safe from, but Vista could guess. There was a lot of speculation where the next Endbringer attack would be.

"I heard on PHO that Coven was actually working for a couple of local companies to fight off the Merchants. I bet I could talk Aegis or Clockblocker into patrolling with me around there. If I see Mage, I could ask about it."

Dinah nodded and started nibbling at her food. "Thanks."

~~Simurgh's Son~~

~~Simurgh's Son~~

It was frightening in a sense just how powerful an intelligence gatherer Skitter was. While she and Harry knelt down on the roof of a distant warehouse, Skitter systematically counted down all the people in the building, where they were, and in some cases what they were wearing or not wearing.

"When we go down there, you'll get an eyeful," Taylor warned.

"And probably a venereal disease if I did anything about it," Harry said.

Skitter snorted.

" _Four capes,"_ Lisa said over their earpieces. " _Skidmark is the leader, Shaker 2. Creates deflector shields, but they're not that strong. He can stagger them to make them stronger. Tinker is Squealer. Makes big, scary cars, tanks and invisible floating, flying trains. Mush is their brute—he can create body-expansion with loose debris almost like power armor. Trainwreck is similar—suit of steampunk armor. No other capes known. Rest are either peddlers and/or users."_

"They're using alright," Taylor muttered.

"Hey, Tattletale, is Squealer the one with the big…"

"Harry," Skitter warned.

"…car with the guns and invisibility we hit yesterday?" Harry finished without pause.

" _Good save. Yes. And yes, she's a D-cup at least."_

"Don't encourage him," Skitter hissed.

"Lisa's sent me porn," Harry blurted.

Genesis interrupted. " _Now who's the Tattletale? Head's up, Wards in the area."_

"Who?" Skitter asked.

" _Looks like Vista and Aegis. They've just diverted their path and seem to be heading our way. Harry, look to your left a few blocks over._ "

Harry looked where directed, tapping his mask to switch the view to infrared. Aegis appeared as a bright spot overhead, while Vista seemed to blur from rooftop to rooftop as she stretched and condensed space itself.

"Want me to go say hi?" Harry asked.

"The Merchants aren't going anywhere," Skitter said dryly.

Harry shot into the air on his staff, ignoring Aegis for Vista. Not surprisingly, though, Aegis dropped down to her side as he approached.

"Heya, Vista, how's life?"

"It'll be better once school's out," she said. "How 'bout you?"

"GED, no more school for me," Harry crowed. "And there's Aegis. What's two of Brockton Bay's finest doing in this neck of the woods?"

"That's a good question," Aegis said with a hard look at Vista.

"Dinah wanted to know how to contact you," Vista said.

Harry ignored Aegis's muffled curse and came down to land. "Is she okay?"

"Yeah, she goes to my school. Any who, she wants to find you 'cause she thinks something bad will happen soon, and she thinks her chances of survival will be better with you."

Harry shrugged. "Yeah, our lair could probably handle a nuke, so it'd be hard for even Behemoth to crack. He probably could, but he'd have to work at it. We've already got it set up to take refugees in our area if anything bad does happen." He reached into one of his pouches and removed one of his old British pounds. "Here, this is charmed for you and you only. It'll let you see our Lair. Won't let you in, and it won't work if you mean us ill or are under duress."

"How the hell could something like that work?" Aegis said.

Harry shrugged. "Magic. If an Endbringer attacks, you get her and bring her to our lair. The coin'll show you."

"If an Endbringer attacks she'll be fighting with the Wards," Aegis said.

Harry met the older boy's gaze squarely. "And what will she do, Aegis? She's fucking twelve. How will her dying help anything, when she could use her power to actually save people? I've seen your Endbringer fights. You're tactics are shit. It's like the Protectorate is intentionally trying to get as many capes killed as possible. No coordination, no planning, no tactics. Just a bunch of heroes throwing their lives away one by one. Vista, you know the deal. You come to Coven, and we'll protect you. If you fight with us, it'll be to save people. You good with that?"

"Yeah, I think so," Vista said.

"Vista, you can't…" Aegis began.

" _Skidmark is stirring, Harry. We need to move soon."_ Skitter.

"So, look, we're about to take out the Merchants, if you want to actually be useful you can take the capes into custody and help the BBPD with the underlings when we're done," Harry said to Aegis.

"What, are they cutting into your profits?" Aegis sneered.

"Nah, we're under contract with the three largest employers in the area to protect from the Merchants. Pretty good pay, too. And guess what? It doesn't go into a bloody college trust, it's our money."

"Which I'm sure you're not paying taxes on," Aegis muttered.

Harry shuttered. "Look, your Protectorate may be shit and your bosses a joke, but not even Kaiser is willing to piss off the IRS, and we're smarter than him. Coven's incorporated, all taxes paid. So, see you soon. Especially you, Vista. I think you're really like Coven. I'm the only guy, so you'd have lots of girlfriends to hang around it. See ya!"

Harry disapparated back to Skitter. "Vista wanted to say hi. We ready to move?"

"Ready," Skitter said. She thrummed with eagerness. "More than ready."

" _Ready_ ," Jess said from the far side of the abandoned factory where the Merchants were holed up.

" _Ready,_ " Canary said, speaking aloud for the first time since they were in position.

"Okay," Harry whispered. "Skitter, it's your show."

"Get me to the roof."

He pulled her with him side-saddle onto his staff and they coasted silently to the wrecked roof of the factory. Within, Harry received an eyeful. "When you said Skidmark was stirring, I didn't think you meant he was stirring in Squealer. Mary mother of God look at those things swing! Are you guys sure we can't recruit her? We could use a Tinker, and she obviously has low standards!"

" _No,_ " four firm responses came simultaneously over their earpieces.

"Damn," Harry muttered. "Oh well, probably catch a pox anyway. So, here we go. On your mark, Skitter."

"Moving everything into position now," she said. She never closed her eyes or seemed to be concentrating, instead watching everything below while simultaneously directing millions of insects. It was amazing and a little frightening.

"Alright, it's all in position," she said.

Harry removed a large glass ball from his pouch. The glass ball was etched in hundreds of small runes. He closed his eyes and whispered the protean charm before crushing the ball in his hands.

Across the floor, the hundreds of vials spread across the floor by Skitter's bugs, all with linking runes, shattered and the sleeping potion within instantly vaporized into a low haze that covered almost every square inch of the factory floor. Instantly Merchants collapsed to the floor in a dead sleep. Skidmark fell over Squealer's back while she fell flat on her stomach on the filthy foam baby mattress they were using for their public entertainment.

" _Mush and Trainwreck are still standing_ ," Genesis reported.

"On it," Skitter said.

Two million insects swarmed onto the two capes. Trainwreck squealed in horror despite being wholly mechanical, though Mush created an impenetrable suit of armor from the trash that covered the factory.

Harry disapparated to a point right in front of Mush and with wave of his hand he transfigured the man's trash armor into a suit of angry feral cats, which Harry then cemented to him using sticking charms to maximize the joy.

He barely had time to blink before a massive steel hand slugged him in the chest and sent him flying backwards. Evidently the bugs couldn't get through Trainwreck's suit either, despite his squealing.

The steam-punk power suit began running after Harry, only to stop when Harry blasted him with lightning curse. The bolt of lightning was arm-thick, lashing out from his staff to connect with Trainwreck briefly. The cape stumbled back, stiffened and fell boneless to the floor.

Meanwhile, Mush started screeching as the cats his trash-armor used to be expressed their displeasure at their situation. Thus exposed, the goblin-like, pink little man fell to a simple stunner. Just like that, all the Merchants were unconscious.

"What the hell was that?"

Harry turned and saw Aegis hovering in the air just down from one of the holes in the roof.

Vista, however, was already on the floor poking at one of Squealer's breasts. "Holy shit, they're so big!"

"Vista, you're twelve!" Aegis shouted, appalled. "Get away from them!"

"She's laying on her stomach and they're so big they flopped out to either side!" Vista said, so enthralled she didn't hear him.

"Really?" Harry apparated to her side. "God those things are huge. Think maybe her boobs are her power?"

"What, radioactive milk?" Vista asked.

"Maybe their prehensile or something," Harry said. "Maybe that's how she builds stuff, with her Tinker-tits."

Vista started howling laughter, but Aegis did not seem amused. "Did you kill all these people?" he demanded.

"Do they look dead?" Harry said. "That one's sitting there scratching his bum. Nah, it was a magic potion to make 'em sleep."

Skitter stepped into the room on the north side while Genesis appeared from the south. Genesis's new body had six arms and they began quickly wrapping wrists and ankles up in zip-ties.

"Now, look away from this huge schlong, young innocent Vista," Harry said in a wise voice as he levitated Skidmark up enough to tie his hands and ankles.

Vista stared, wide-eyed. "Holy shit."

Aegis almost broke the floor in his effort to dive and cover her eyes. "That's disgusting!" he declared.

"That's fucking impressive is what it is," Genesis announced from amidst a group tied Merchant thugs. "Ten inches?"

"Sure does explain why they call her Squealer," Harry said. "Wow. Okay, the lovely Tinker-tits next." He tied her off—through the floor the Coven gang members emerged with hundreds of zip-ties.

"Oh, bonus, found the cash," Lisa announced.

"Of course the Thinker finds the cash," Harry muttered. "How much?"

"Just under a hundred grand," she announced. "And the drug stash. We'll leave that here for the BBPD."

"You're taking the money?" Aegis said.

"Yep, in our contract, we keep any spoils we want," Harry said. "What, you want the drugs?"

"No!"

Harry ignored the Wards and levitated the four capes of the Merchants into a group. He cast a bubblehead charm over them before turning to the captives. "Skitter, let me know when you're ready."

"Ready," she said immediately.

"Canary, you ready?"

"Ready, Mage."

Harry removed another glass rune key and broke it. Another set of vials exploded around the floor, and almost instantly the non-powered members of the Merchants woke up and started screaming when they realized they were captured.

Canary walked up to the elevated pile of couches that served as Skidmard's throne and cleared her throat. She wore a simple white dress, though Harry and Skitter were working on what he hoped was a spectacular costume for her.

"Hello, Merchants. Please listen to me, this is important."

Her power whipped out, and instantly every voice fell quiet.

"I know most of you really don't want to live this way. You're here because you think you have nowhere else to go. But there is a better way. The police are going to be here soon, and the PRT. I want all of you to cooperate with the police. I want you all to tell them everything you've done to be where are you now, and I want you to be honest with yourself over where you want to be and what you want to do with your lives. If you want to be criminals, then admit it and you'll feel better. But if you want to actually have better, then _be_ better. I know you can. Thank you."

She stepped down from the couch and walked to Aegis.

"Hello," she said simply before moving past him as if she were not a convicted felon who just used her power to master two hundred mundane humans, and he the cape charged with capturing her.

"So, think we're done here," Mage said. "Tattletale, we got it all on camera?"

"And posted to Youtube. Had to do some last minute blurring, but get it in. We've already got a spike in our Patronage Accounts. Not surprising most of the hits are for Skid's schlong of doom and Squealer's tinker-tits. Even censored."

"It might be a bit Machiavellian," Harry admitted to Aegis. "But if you're going to do good, make sure everyone actually sees you doing good. It makes the people who are _supposed_ to do good but don't look even worse."

He then turned to Vista and nodded. "See you later, I hope."

"Yeah, see you later," she said with a brilliant smile.

* * *

A/N: It was pointed out to me that Canary was a Cauldron cape. It just had no bearing on her character so I never bothered to look it up, and I'm not going to change it. In a similar vein, I decided to make Vista an orphan. In canon we never saw or heard from her parents other than she triggered because of their broken marriage (I think. I'm old, I forget things). But it suited the story better for her to be an orphan, so she's an orphan. Transformation fiction, folks. Whether by intention, laziness or just daft forgetfulness, I transform things. Thanks for reading.


	30. Interlude: Gain

A/N: Chap 29 review responses are in my forums. And...good times are over for now.

* * *

 **Interlude: Gain**

Her father wouldn't look her in the eye. Mother would, but whenever she did her gaze became distant and unfocused, as if she couldn't tolerate what she saw. They said they loved her and hugged her often. They made her favorite foods for dinner every day, and even bought her a new gaming console and television for her bedroom, despite saying for the past two years they wouldn't.

"We don't want you holed up in your room playing games instead of spending time with your family," her father insisted before, whenever she pointed out how all her friends had their own television, and Liana Peters got a new GameStation and a subscription for unlimited games.

That was before. Before Coil. Before they delivered her back with an addiction to a cocktail of drugs that she'd been completely cured of, but could never forget.

Now, almost three weeks later, she had her own television with satellite in her room, featuring hundreds of channels she no longer had any interest in watching. She had a new GameStation 3 with an expensive monthly subscription to unlimited games she no longer had any interest in playing. And she had a family that no longer insisted that she spend time with them because every time they saw her, it reminded them of their failure and their loss.

 _Seventy-two point eight-eight five percent chance of divorce before year end. Ninety-two percent before I reach high school._

Tragedy broke marriages. She'd read this online, and she believed it. Tragedy made existing cracks into canyons. Sometimes it made bonds stronger—a lucky few survived tragedy closer than ever. Most marriages, however, broke. They didn't always divorce, but they broke and could never be fully repaired.

Like Dinah herself. She was broken, and she didn't believe she could ever be repaired. Whenever she tried to sleep, the numbers would plow through her dreams and nightmares like bullets, long streams of probabilities for horrors that left her gasping and crying.

For the first few nights, her mother and father put a baby monitor in her room and came rushing in every time she woke. After a week, the battery died and they just forgot to replace it. She woke in the middle of the night, shivering from the pool of sweat that soaked into the sheets of her bed, and stared at the ceiling praying for release.

 _Eighty eight percent chance Mage could assist._

She spent two nights at PRT headquarters while their thinkers classified her power. (Thinker 2/9 – Precog.) They offered her a place in the Wards not as a hero, but as a PRT-sponsored Thinker. She considered it ( _Seventy-two point five five eight percent chance identity compromised and abducted again_ ) but told her parents she didn't want to do it just then.

They took her out to her favorite restaurant and ordered her a lasagna and after a large fudge brownie with melting vanilla ice cream drizzled with caramel, as if it were her birthday. They didn't understand why she cried after a few bites and stopped eating. They asked her, almost begged her to eat it, but she couldn't.

The fudge and ice cream felt cold and warm and gooey, but she couldn't taste the sweet hardly at all. _Ninety-nine point eight-eight two percent chance hypogeusia caused by trigger event and forced drug abuse is permanent. Mage's potion couldn't fix everything._

She switched schools two weeks later with special tutoring sessions to help her make up for the lost time. "You'll see, honey," father told her. "Once we get back into our routine, everything will be better."

She didn't need her power to know he was lying.

Her power gave her little hope for things to get better. She knew that Mage was her best chance, but her parents and her uncle firmly sided with the PRT's position regarding the villains of Coven. She knew her cousin Rory was a cape in the Protectorate, and knew that influenced her family's position.

Again, she didn't need her power to know they were all wrong.

When she saw Vista in her civilian garb in the school, numbers began to flow through her head so fast and hard it hurt. She ignored the pain when Vista sat down and introduced herself as Missy Biron.

Looking at this girl who was a cape and also her own age, Dinah felt her power kicking out numbers. _Eighty-two point six-five-five percent chance Vista defects to Coven before year end._

"Can I ask you something?" Dinah asked. She forced down a few tasteless chips because she knew she had to eat, though the act had become one of drudgery and loss.

"Sure?" Missy sounded eager to help.

"If…I mean…could you get me to Mage?"

It did not surprise Dinah that Missy didn't know where he was, but as the two sat and spoke Dinah could feel the probabilities increasing exponentially that Vista would find out and help her.

Panacea came to her home a few days after that, requested by her uncle to make sure she was okay. Dinah didn't like Panacea that much, but only because the older girl was so terrified of her own power she had wrapped herself in a cocoon of doubt and paranoia that made her very bad company, and gave her a terrible temper.

"You're not eating enough," she said.

"No taste."

Panacea winced. "I…I know. I'm sorry, it's a perception issue, not just the nerves in your tongue. Mage's potion fixed your addiction, but not that. I wish I could do more. Perhaps you should switch to nutrition shakes?"

"Okay, I'll try that," Dinah said, as much to get Panacea out of her home as to acknowledge it was actually a good idea.

That night, Dinah did not sleep at all. She stared unseeing at her ceiling as numbers burned in her head until her whole head throbbed from it. She glanced at her clock and saw it was after midnight. It was May 15th and…and… _ninety-seven point five five percent chance of Endbringer attack before dinner._

Tears hung in her eyes but she didn't get out of bed. She considered going to her parents, but knew that wouldn't change anything. They, like her uncle, lived in Captain's Hill, a low-slung mountain far enough away from the coast that they would most likely be spared the worst of any Endbringer attack, or at least be far enough away to escape unscathed.

The numbers ran in her head. If she left, Coil would recapture her. He was waiting in Boston, consolidating his emergency assets and just waiting to finish what he started with her. If she stayed in her house, she would die. That probability was close to 100%. It wouldn't be the Endbringer, but the angry refugees from the rest of the city who were going to swamp Captain's Hill.

Her best bet was Coven. They saved her once, they could do it again.

She went to school that morning as if nothing was wrong, though she made a point of hugging her parents. "Bye, Mommy. Bye, Dad. I love you."

It made her heart ache to see how her hugs made them so happy, and how fleeting their happiness was. She could hear her father raising his voice and her mother start to cry as the PRT agent assigned to her walked her out the door.

Lunch for the sixth-graders came at eleven in the staggered lunch schedules of their middle school. She forced herself to eat, washing the bland, tasteless chicken nuggets down with water, while looking desperately for Missy. When she found her, even though her power told her it was a high likelihood she would be there, she couldn't help but sigh in relief.

"You look like shit, Dinah," Missy said. Missy had a foul mouth, but Dinah didn't mind. She knew that Missy was her friend—she didn't need power to know that, but had used it anyway to make sure.

"Endbringer attack in two hours or less," Dinah said with a shrug. "Kept me up all night thinking about it."

"Yeah, that would suck," Missy said with a laugh as she sat. Only to blink, lose her smile, and look Dinah in the face. "What?"

"In two hours or less." Dinah met the gaze squarely. "I'm scared. It's going to be really bad. We need to go to Mage. We need to go now."

"Shit." Missy's hands shook as she looked down at her tray of food. "My costume is in the principal's office."

Dinah stood without hesitation. "I'll come with you."

It actually made Dinah feel better when Missy took her hand and the two ran out of the cafeteria. Two of the teachers on duty called for them to return to their seats, but Missy ignored their indignant shouts and ran for Principal Lachey's office. There were a few perks to being a Ward—ignoring teachers in an emergency was one of them.

The two girls reached the front office and ignored the two parents and three students waiting to check in or check out. The old senior secretary knew Missy's secret and waved her on in.

"She's free."

"Thanks, Missus Phillips!" Missy called.

They rushed into Principal Lachey's open office.

"Sorry, emergency!" Missy called.

"Close the door, then, Miss Biron," Principal Lachey said. "Miss Alcott, how are you doing?"

"Fine, thank you," Dinah said by rote. She said nothing more as Missy disappeared into a private bathroom. Just minutes later, she returned in her Vista costume, complete with her visor helmet.

"Do you think it will hurt to tell her?" Vista asked Dinah, while nodding to the principal.

"Zero probability it makes things worse," Dinah said. "Sixty percent chance it saves a hundred or more lives."

"That means it's okay?"

Dinah nodded.

"Cool." Vista looked at the principal, who while not really all that nice at least tried to be fair. "Yeah, you might want to evacuate the school to the nearest Endbringer shelter. You might want to go now."

The principal paled the color of bone and looked as if she might faint.

"Ninety-nine point nine-eight-two-percent chance the attack occurs within eighty minutes. Ninety-nine point seven-nine percent chance of Leviathan." Dinah felt a drop of hot moisture run down her nose and a surge of pain right behind her eyes. She wiped the moisture away to see red smeared on her nose.

"Can you get me to Harry?" she asked Vista.

"Yeah, come on!"

Vista didn't care about the blood. She grabbed Dinah's hand and rushed them out of the startled, terrified principal's office through a dedicated back door that let her bypass the administrative offices and all the other students. They emerged onto the parking lot which looked out over the city. While the sun shone brightly overhead, Dinah could see a tiny dark cloud on the edge of the horizon. From that distance it didn't look like it was moving, but her power told her it was moving far, far too fast.

Suddenly the world changed focus. It seemed to Dinah almost like the world itself was a zoom lens, and Vista with a wave of her hand had just increased the magnification in a line to the cable company building, bringing the edge of its roof almost to the tip of the parking lot. She tugged at Dinah's hands, and suddenly when the world reverted to normal they stood on top of a building two miles away from Captain's Hill.

Vista removed a coin that had the queen of England's profile on it and rubbed it.

"There!" she said, pointing into a distance Dinah couldn't follow. The world stretched again and suddenly they were on the top of the six-story Magnate Shipping building. A second later they were on the street half a mile away, running toward a blank stop that made her probabilities fail. It was a good headache, though.

Vista continued to hold Dinah's hand as she pounded on a door. "Harry, let me…oh shit! Dammit, Skitter, that scared me!"

Dinah had to fight back a scream when she saw the bug person appear out of nowhere beside her.

"Vista?" The bug person's voice sounded incredibly creepy, like a thousand crickets orchestrating their chirps in such a way as to emulate human speech, without actually being human speech. "Dinah?"

"Endbringer attack, like in…"

"Seventy minutes," Dinah supplied.

"…Seventy minutes," Vista continued.

The bug person disappeared and a moment later Mage appeared with a pop, but not in costume. Instead, it was Harry Bailey in a pair of blue jeans and a plaid button up. He had dirt on his hands and a little smudge on his cheeks. He looked intently at the girls, but glanced over their heads at the dark cloud growing on the horizon.

"Right. Both of you, take my hand."

He offered and Dinah accepted, letting go of Misty. Touching his hand, the probabilities smoothed and changed. One hundred percent chance he would try to protect her. Once hundred percent chance he would try to protect them all. Sixty-eight percent chance he would succeed.

Her eyes widened as two large, beautifully plastered white buildings appeared, each in the general shape of a warehouse but built with materials no mere warehouse could afford. The front door opened and they rushed into a wide open space lined in large metal shelves rising two floors up and filled with crates and crates of supplies.

Probabilities shattered; her power had no purchase with what she saw. It was impossible, and it was that impossibility that convinced her it was safe.

"You were waiting for this?" Vista asked. "You expected it?"

"Dinah dropped a few hints, remember?" Harry said. "Besides, we're contracting with the three largest employers now to offer shelter. Tattletale's probably already reaching out to them. Come on, we'll get you two in an apartment before it gets too crowded."

Vista helped by bringing the apartments at the end of the warehouse closer.

"Okay, that's cool," Harry declared. He rushed them up the stairs.

Tattletale emerged from her room/office. "Suit up, Mage. Dinah, I'm so glad you could make it. Do you want us to call your parents to let them know you're okay?"

It didn't surprise her that Tattletale knew her parents' number. She nodded; there was zero chance they would try to recover her with less than an hour before an Endbringer attack.

Harry led them down a hallway to the last room on the end. It held a small bathroom with a shower and two sets of bunkbeds. "You'll probably end up sharing, but it's yours for the duration. Vista, would you be willing to help us evacuate civilians?"

"Yes!" Vista said. She then turned and hugged Dinah. "Thanks for getting me. You be safe, okay?"

Dinah nodded. "Okay."

The two disappeared. Rather than stay put, Dinah drifted up the hall to Tattletale's office that just happened to be where the teenaged Thinker lived. She looked over her shoulder at Dinah and waived her over before putting the phone on speaker.

Instantly she heard her father yelling. "…Alexandria herself rip you apart for daring take my little girl again, you cold hearted…"

"Dad, it's Dinah," she said, cutting off.

"Dinah, sweetie, are you okay?"

"Ninety-two percent chance I'd be kidnapped or killed if I stayed with you," she said. "Eighty five percent chance you or mom would die in the process. If we stayed in the house, one hundred percent chance we'd die because of angry refugees. This was my best hope for survival. I asked Vista to bring me; she's here too helping Mage evacuate civilians. Please go. Go up to New York, you'll be safe there. I promise I'm okay."

"Darling, we can't leave you!" Her mother must have picked up.

"I left you," Dinah said, though even to her own ears it sounded cold. "I had to. To save you both. I'm sorry. I have to cut ties. To survive. Best probability for us all to live. Good bye."

She backed away but didn't leave the room as she hugged herself.

"Mr. and Mrs. Alcott, this is Tattletale again. I know the Protectorate is not a fan of Coven, but I can promise you that we'll do everything we can to keep Dinah safe. We didn't go through all the trouble of rescuing her from that corrupt PRT director just to let her get hurt now. You have our number, if we keep phone and services after the attack you can call any time. Otherwise we'll try to get messages to you as possible. I have to go now."

She hung up and then immediately dialed another number, still on the speaker. "PRT ENE, how can I direct your call?"

"This is Tattletale with Coven. Endbringer alert. I need Piggot or Armsmaster on the line right now."

Dinah was surprised at how calm the voice sounded. "Please hold."

Less than a second later a harsh-sounding woman answered. Dinah recognized her as Director Piggot. "This is Piggot."

"Director, Tattletale. Dinah Alcott has sought shelter in our base. An Endbringer attack is eminent. Dinah?"

"Nine-nine percent chance Leviathan. Nine-nine percent chance he reaches us within sixty minutes." She wiped more blood from her nose.

"We were aware of the possibility," Piggot said. Over the phone it sounded like she was choking on her words. "Thank you for the notice. Can we expect Coven to help?"

"As long as the Truce is in effect, yes. Our first priority is a contractual responsibility to our clients, after which we will assist." Tattletale disconnected before turning to face Dinah. She tilted her head, and within Dinah's mind the numbers flowed into a realization that Tattletale understood. The older woman slowly reached out a hand, which Dinah took, and pulled her into a gentle, comforting hug that brought tears to Dinah's eyes.

"He'll protect you," Tattletale whispered. "We'll protect you. As far as we're concerned, you're a member of Coven now."

Dinah nodded. "You're going to fight?"

"Once we get the refugees inside, yeah," she said. "As much as I can. I'm a Thinker, I can at least help coordinate. Mage will fight. Skitter and Genesis will both fight. Canary will be here, though. You've met her."

Dinah nodded. The sweet, beautiful woman with the feathers in her bright yellow hair. "You're scared."

"Hell yes," Tattletale said. "That's the terrible thing about my power. I know the odds of dying as well as your power could tell me. I know it for a fact. But I'm going to go anyway. This place, though, it'll protect you."

"I know."

At the far end of the massive warehouse, a wide set of hanger doors opened to reveal a huge crowd of terrified people, many of them clutching children or bags as they rushed in. Harry's voice boomed out over them.

"Make your way to the stairs at the far left of the structure, to the lower level and just find a space below. Make your way to the back and keep in mind we have a lot of people coming!"

Lots and lots and lots of people. "Where are they all from?" Dinah asked.

"Magnate Shipping, Seaboard Railroad and the Dockworker's Association," Tattletale said. "At least, in the first group. The second will be parents who had to get their kids from school, then any stragglers, though this close to the coast…"

Outside, rain began falling in such powerful torrents that made the windows look more like submarine ports. People ran even faster inside, almost tripping over each other in their desperation to escape the approaching disaster.

Dinah lost track of Harry, only to see him appear with a handful of kids. He disappeared again, and a second later appeared once again with more kids. He was saving the kids of the people rushing in from their local schools, wherever those schools might be. "Does he have a distance limit to his teleportation?" she asked.

"About a continent," Tattletale said. "He could probably cross the Pacific, but his method isn't stable. He can hurt himself physically, and others, if he's not careful."

He appeared suddenly in Lisa's room. Somehow, sometime, he'd changed into his magic costume with his facemask, which resisted the rain.

"I saw the Protectorate signal at PRT headquarters," he said. "Truce is in effect. Skitter is coming but Jess decided to stay and help with the refugees. Are you sure you don't want to stay here with Dinah?"

Tattletale shook her head, though Dinah knew there was a hundred percent chance that Tattletale very much wanted to stay in the shelter. She wouldn't though. That was also a 100% certainty.

Mage knelt down by Dinah and gave her a hug. "If it gets too bad, or if you see any cracks in the walls, go downstairs, okay? The protection is designed to contract rather than collapse. It gets stronger as it gets smaller. The center of the room down stairs will be the strongest point in the building, probably in the whole city."

Dinah nodded and then hugged him, though she didn't speak. He hugged her back, like she knew he would, and it felt just as reassuring as she'd hoped.

He stood and with Tattletale by his side turned and left the room. Dinah drifted out onto the balcony and watched as Canary and several men and women in frumpy business suits guided and directed the refugees into the warehouse. Minutes passed with the inexorable march of inevitability. Outside they heard a loud boom that shook the ground under them, but not the building itself. Then they all heard a distant sound that Dinah couldn't identify at first.

It grew louder and louder, like the Doppler effect of an on-coming motor bike, until it shifted from a rumble to a deep, animalistic roar.

"Be safe," Dinah whispered. She let the probabilities fall away as she opted for a simple, heartfelt prayer.


	31. Determination 1

A/N: Chap 30 review responses are in my forums as normal.

* * *

 **Determination 4.1***

It was raining hard by the time they got the last of their clients into the lair. The three companies between them employed almost fifteen hundred people, most of whom were with Magnate or the railroad. With their families, that number was closer to three thousand.

Harry felt odd leaving so many people alone in their lair with just Canary and Jess, but he saw no help for it. "Where to?"

"East of the Mall, between the Docks and Downtown," Tattletale said. "It's already on PHO. Are we all sure about this?"

"Yes," Skitter said without hesitation. Harry nodded before holding out his staff for the girls.

"What about you?" Skitter asked Harry as she and Tattletale mounted.

"Oh, I can fly. I just like having the staff more," Harry assured her. "Gives me a better sense of control."

He cast the flight charm on himself and, simultaneously charging the flight runes on his staff, the three of them started into the air. Unlike the charmed brooms of Potter's childhood, Harry's staff was not intrinsically magical, it was just a highly attuned conduit for his magic. Once airborne they started flying south from their lair to the assembly point.

"No jokes about us riding your staff," Skitter declared.

"I'll just bask in the symbolism," Harry promised.

Underneath them, tens of thousands of people crowded the streets in a desperate gambit to escape the coming nightmare. Even with the better part of an hour's warning, people were still crowding the streets. They saw several cars trying to weave their way through the thick streams of people, taking up space and just making things worse.

"God, people are stupid," Skitter said from the broom. "Endbringer pamphlets say go on foot."

Harry merely nodded. He could see police trying to direct traffic, using cars and tape to manage the flow of terrified people. One of the cops saw them heading south and gave them a salute. Harry returned the gesture, oddly touched. Officially, they were villains, but at least during the crises, any cape that fought the Endbringer was considered a hero.

Ahead, they saw a contrail of black smoke bisect the dark, glowering sky. A giant robot screamed down over their heads less than a block away, landing near a six-story brown brick building with dark-glazed windows. It sat like a lonely sentinel on a hill overlooking the bay, surrounded on one side by an empty parking lot and on the other a sandy beach littered with occasional wave breaks.

Even if the big freaking robot hadn't given it away, the hundreds of PRT uniforms and handful of PRT armored vans clinched it. Rather than fly to the building, they came down near the edge of the parking lot just in time to see a true teleporter appear with a group of teenagers in bright costumes.

"I can't apparate that many people," Harry muttered.

"Jealous?" Skitter asked.

"Just another way his teleportation sucks ass," Tattletale said.

The world to his left, toward the bay, blurred a moment before Vista appeared. "Got the last of your people to your lair," she said with a nervous, twitchy laugh.

Tattletale gave her a shoulder hug. "Good job, kiddo. We couldn't have done it without you."

"We really couldn't have," Skitter echoed. "You going to stay with us or with the Wards?"

"Wards for now, I guess," Vista said. She sounded sad at the thought. "You meant it, though, right? About me…"

"Anytime," Mage said, staring at her intently mask to mask. "You'll always be welcome. You and anyone else you care about."

She waved at him. Though Harry couldn't see her eyes through her visor, he noticed how her lower lip quivered before she ran ahead to join the other Wards.

They followed what Harry guessed was the squad of out-of-town Wards into the spacious lobby of the building. The PRT had set folding chairs up in rows and columns that filled the whole lobby, all facing a trio of large, expensive looking televisions. Behind those were picture windows that put the approaching storm on such perfect display it almost seemed as if the building had been aimed at it.

Looking around he saw Vista just arrive at her team's side. Aegis was speaking to her urgently with lots of angry glances toward Coven, but she didn't appear to be listening. The other teens on her team didn't look older, just taller. Glancing around, Harry was suddenly struck by how young all the heroes were. In his head, the familiar Simurgh's song jumbled together into a senseless noise as he found himself surrounded by more capes than he'd ever known before.

"They're all fucking children," he whispered.

"Only three out of five underage capes make it past twenty-one," Tattletale said from his side. "Usually because of Endbringer fights like this one."

Harry felt strangely old as he studied the children preparing to throw their lives away in a fight they could not win, only prolong. Suddenly his eyes met those of Panacea. She stood next to her sister and the rest of New Wave, well away from the rest of the Wards and villains who came to fight. Oddly enough, she wasn't glaring. She met his gaze squarely; he noticed her shoulders were straight and she actually stood taller than last time he met.

He started toward her and saw how the rest of New Wave form up around her. Interestingly, Gallant stood by Glory Girl and away from his own team. Harry was only dimly aware of the rest of Coven following.

"You," Brandish growled. "You'd better hope the Endbringer gets me, because when we're done I'm going to…"

"Get turned into a fucking aardvark if you don't shut up," Harry snapped to the startled woman. He turned to Panacea. "You're not going to be on the front line. Where are you setting up your triage unit?"

"Why do you want to know?" she demanded. Unlike her adopted mother, she didn't sound angry. Not friendly, but not angry.

"Look, you remember the portkey?" he asked.

"How could we forget?"

Harry turned and waved across the floor. Perhaps louder than he intended to, he said, "The Protectorate is about to send a bunch of fucking children to die. I have a means to give them all emergency teleportation to any given spot based on the severity of their injuries. I'd like to send them to you. And yes, I'm including your sister in the list. Where will you be?"

"Ames, don't..." Glory Girl began.

"I don't trust you," Panacea said.

"You couldn't count the fucks I don't give," Harry snapped back. "Where will you be, so maybe I can help you save a few of these kid's lives."

"Like you're that old," Panacea snorted.

"I've seen more civilizations die than you've seen birthdays, little girl. Where…the… fuck… will… you… be?"

"Memorial, far inland," Panacea finally said.

"Thank you," Harry said. He looked at the hero they almost killed. "Give me your tiara."

"What?" Glory Girl sputtered.

"Your Amy's sister, so you get the first portkey—personal teleportation."

"Make sure it includes her clothing, please," Panacea said dryly.

Amy's cousin Shielder snickered. Brandish's face turned bright red.

Harry rubbed the back of his head. "Yeah, will do. Skitter gave me enough hell about that already."

Hesitantly Glory Girl handed her tiara over and Harry cast the spell. He handed it back, then cast another spell on it. "There, it shouldn't come off unless you choose to take it off. If you get hurt, or hit hard enough to make it break, it'll take you to the lobby of Brockton Memorial." He raised his voice. "Any cape under 18, get your ass over here so I can help save your life. Gallant, that starts with you. Hold still, I'm going to Portkey your helmet."

He did so by slapping it, hard. Tattletale snickered behind him.

"Same spiel, if you get hurt, or hit hard enough to make it break, it'll take you to the lobby of Brockton Memorial."

A cool, calculated voice cut in. "What do you think you're doing?"

Harry turned and saw the dark gray visor of Alexandria not two feet away, flanked by a dozen other heroes. None were local, though he knew the local capes were nearby.

"You know," he said with quiet determination, "I hate organizations that send kids to fight their battles. Kids. Doesn't matter if they're capes. Kids. So, I'm going to make sure every kid under eighteen has a personal teleportation device that'll take them to Panacea if they get hurt."

"You're not going to use unproven tinker tech right before an Endbringer fight." She stated it as a matter of fact.

Harry snorted with contempt. "You're right. I'm deploying magic. It's a spell, been around for…actually, I'm not sure how long ago it was created. For all I know, it could be billions or even trillions of years old. But it works. I could demonstrate, if you'd like?"

"Demonstrate on me, if you would."

Harry turned and then gaped. "Holy shit you're hot. Love the…"

Then Tattletale was there, hand over his mouth. "Please forgive our resident perv. He means well."

The woman who would have been naked save for coruscating, strategically placed crystal scales and a long crystalline horn looked unimpressed. She was also a full foot and a half taller than Harry, which put his face almost even with her very voluptuous chest.

"Er, right. I'm guessing from that horn your Narwhal. So, tell me where you want to go?"

"Far side of the room," she said.

He patted a large flake of violet crystal on her shoulder, having to reach up to do so. The scale was just one of hundreds that covered her otherwise bare and very tall but perfectly proportioned body in an enticing display. A moment later, she was on the far side of the room.

"By the way, I'm single," he called to her.

"And underage," Narwhal noted with a wry smile as she walked back.

"Only in this life. In my previous life I was like a gazillion years old."

"Jesus, Mage, give it a rest, Leviathan is coming," Skitter said. "And I thought we were dating?"

"If you want it put a ring on it," Harry's response.

Skitter's response was to slap the back of his head, hard.

He grinned behind his mask before meeting Alexandria's gaze. "So, that good enough for you? Or are you going to continue to insist that all these kids die when they don't have to?"

"It was unusual, but I could not feel anything harmful," Narwhal said quietly to Alexandria as she rejoined them. "Nor was it a trick, I could feel the potential energy in my scale."

Harry ignored the exchange as he enchanted Vista's helmet, then moved on to Aegis, Clockblocker and the rest of the Wards, including those that had just arrived.

He looked over to Hookwolf. "Rune coming?"

"All capes come to these if they have any honor," Hookwolf declared.

"Then get her ass over here." Harry looked around and cast a _Sonorous_. "All capes under eighteen to me. Emergency teleportation. To me, please. Rune, that means you too, young lady."

"What's this going to do?" a metallic Ward Harry didn't recognize asked.

"Zap you to Panacea if you get hurt bad enough," he said. "All capes under eighteen, Wards, villains or rogues, come on by."

"What about heroes over eighteen?" a Protectorate hero asked.

Harry shrugged. "You're legally old enough to make the decision to fight. The kids here shouldn't be here at all, so they get portkeys."

It depressed him just how many kids showed up. Most were Wards, but a few were villains just from the tone of their costumes. Rune arrived and he charmed her helmet. A few were Rogues, he'd guess. A hundred or more, all under eighteen. Some looked barely older than Vista.

Finally, when every under-age cape had a portkey, he turned to look at Panacea's cousins, Laserdream and Shielder. "You're both over 18, but I figure we owe New Wave over that whole nearly-killing-Glory Girl thing. Not to mention getting to see Brandish naked. That alone was worth a lot. Do you want portkeys too?"

"I'm sure it has nothing to do with Laserdream's bust size," Skitter muttered.

"I've accepted that I'm a shallow person," Harry admitted.

Rather than be upset, Skitter just shook her head. Laserdream, who admittedly was healthily endowed, actually blushed behind her helmet. "You really are a jerk, aren't you?"

"Absolutely," Harry agreed. "I promise it will transport clothes too. Was that a yes?"

"Sure."

He charmed Laserdream's helmet, then her brother's. Finally, he held out a hand and conjured a simple red rose which he handed to Panacea. Lowering his voice, he said, "In your way, you're the most powerful, most important cape here. Alexandria or Legend might save lives by beating back the monster, but you save lives by _actually_ saving lives. If Memorial gets hit, break that stem. It'll take you to our lair. We have civilians sheltered there, and supplies."

She accepted it hesitantly, scowling as she did.

"If I can have everyone's attention, please?"

Harry saw Legend standing near the televisions. Eidolon stood behind the TVs, looking through the window at the fast-approaching storm. "We owe what warning we have to Dragon and Armsmaster for their early alert. We had time to gather, which gives us more time to prepare. With this advantage, I hope this could be one of the good days."

Tattletale snorted. "Fucking glory hogs," she muttered. "Dinah called it an hour before they did."

Legend continued without pause, meeting every gaze in the room squarely. Harry hated to admit it, but Legend just had _presence._ "You need to know your chances going in. Given the statistics from our previous encounters with this beast, a 'good day' still means that one in four of the people in this room will not make it out of this fight alive."

He let the message sink in before continuing. "I'm telling you your chances now because you deserve to know. And frankly we just don't get the chance to inform those of you brave enough to step up and fight these monsters. The primary message I want to convey, even more than briefing you on the particulars of his abilities, organizing formations and battle plans, is that I do not want you to underestimate Leviathan. I have seen too many good heroes," he paused for a fraction of a second, "And villains, too, die because they let their guard down."

The rain outside was coming down so heavily that firehoses could not have competed. Harry listened intently, flanked by Skitter and Tattletale, while Vista and her team of Wards hovered nearby. Legend explained what they knew of Leviathan, of his cunning and violent intelligence, his near-seeming invulnerability and his speed and strength.

Then came the description of Leviathan's power. "What sets him apart is his focus on water," Legend explained. "You're likely aware of his afterimage, his water echo. This is no mere splash of water…."

The words continued on, blurring a little in Harry's mind as he _clicked_ into his own thoughts. He'd studied the Endbringers since he was eight. The entirety of Newfoundland sank during a Leviathan attack in 2005, killing half a million people instantly. Before that, Leviathan destroyed Kyushu, killing over nine million people and specifically disrupting evacuation attempts. That attack essentially split Japan in half and ruined the country. Behemoth was the Cape Killer. Simurgh was the Hope Killer. Leviathan was the City Killer.

Harry blinked himself out his thoughts when Armsmaster took over. "The Wards are handing out armbands of Dragon's design. These are adjustable to slide over your arm and should be tightened around your wrist. The screen on the top of the armband notes your position on a grid, as well as Leviathan's last updated location. Use this. You'll also note there are two buttons. The button to the left lets you send messages to everyone else wearing an armband. It will not, unless you are a member of the Protectorate or otherwise a veteran of these fights, directly communicate what you say to everyone else wearing an armband. Dragon has a program screening messages and passing them on through the network based on priority, to cut down on unnecessary chatter that could distract from crucial information. If you must bypass this three to five second delay, speak the words 'Hard Override' before conveying your message. Abuse of this feature will lose you the ability to send any further messages."

"The second button is a ping. Use it in the case of an emergency, to alert others if you are in danger or hurt. If it is not an emergency, but you want assistance, such as a flier to get you to another vantage point or you see an opportunity to turn the tables, press both buttons, tell the armband what you want. Dragon's program will prioritize your needs, with assistance being directed your way if others are not occupied with more pressing matters. The armband tracks your condition and will automatically send a ping if you are badly injured or unconscious."

Legend took back over, but Harry was barely listening as his mind circled through what he knew about Leviathan.

Someone handed him an armband—Metal boy. A flat, square screen showed a satellite view of the building they were in, and the surrounding parking lot and beach. A display read: 'State name'.

Harry pressed the communicator button and spoke, "Mage." His name appeared on the display, with a yes and no display in the corners over the respective buttons. "Yes."

Beside him, he heard Skitter and Tattletale do the same.

Legend was still organizing the groups. "-forcefields, telekinesis, whatever your power, if you can interrupt Leviathan's movements or help reduce the impacts of the waves, you're the backup defense! Bastion will direct you!"

"Where do we go?" Skitter asked.

Legend's voice rang over the room. "Movers! We need fliers, teleporters, runners! You'll be responding to pings! Rescue the fallen, get them to emergency care, assist any others where needed! Myrddin will give you your orders!

"Long ranged attackers, with me! If you fall in more than one category, go with the group where you think you'll be the greatest assistance!"

"The rest of you-" Legend was interrupted by shouts. Bastion bellowed, pointed, and the people in his team moved.

Harry braced himself and looked out the window. Beyond, he could see the air shimmer with forcefields, only for the fields to collapse as soon as the water hit them. The whole building rocked with the impact of a tsunami-like wave. Water broke through the windows, carrying chunks of brick, glass and the metal window frames into the lobby.

One of the television screens toppled in the onrushing flood. The other two showed a flickering series of images, a half second of each. Harry saw the satellite image of the entire coast of Brockton Bay being struck by a massive wave dozens of miles long. The ferry, the harbor down at the south end of town, the Boardwalk, all smashed by the initial wave.

Harry didn't hesitate. Tattletale may have hated him for it, but he wanted her alive to feel that hate. He grabbed her and Skitter, spun, and seconds later they appeared on the roof of the Brockton Life Insurance Building on the edge of the Docks.

"Tattletale, you okay?" Skitter asked.

"Yeah, I'm okay." Harry turned to look at her. She was pale, but not throwing up. "It helps to close my eyes and cover my ears."

He nodded before turning his attention back to the city.

"Holy shit," he whispered. His voice was lost in the sound of the rain around them.

The initial wave struck everything from the Boat Graveyard to the beaches at the far southern end of the city across the bay. The Boardwalk was shattered, as were the beaches and buildings that lined the back downtown. The devastation was breathtaking and on the verge of simply being unbelievable.

The worst hit was the Boardwalk. The ragged storm barrier that protected the high end tourist area had been shattered by the wave. It was there that Harry could see the creature moving in from the water. Even from their distance, he could see it through the now drenching rain.

Leviathan stood thirty feet tall, this whole form muscular without being bulky. The exception was around his shoulders, neck and chest, with muscles that bulged out in ridiculous proportion. He looked like body-builder puffed up to five times a normal human size, but with a tail.

"Get us closer," Tattletale said.

Both mounted his staff and he flew them closer. Doing so, Harry could see the disturbing, inhuman proportions of the monster. His calves and forearms were simply too long for his height; his clawed fingers and digitigrade feet doubly so. He moved with a languid sort of grace as he advanced through the spraying water. His arms moved like pendulums, claws sweeping against the water's surface, while his upper body swayed left and right, as if to give counterbalance to his great height. His tail, almost twice his height, lashed out like a whip behind and around him in time with his steps, perhaps borne of the same need for balance that gave him his seemingly unsteady gait.

Whole aquariums of water poured around him in the wake of his movements, roughly the same amount of mass as the body part that had just occupied the space. This 'afterimage' streamed down him and splashed violently against the water he waded through.

"He has no face," Tattletale said.

Harry looked and saw she was right. Leviathan had no nose or mouth, no ears. His face, what there was of it, looked like a flat, rigid expanse of the same scaly skin that covered the rest of him. The flat surface of Leviathan's face was broken up only by four cracks or tears – one on the right side of his face, three on the left. In each of those dark gaps, the green orbs of his eyes glowed with a light that pierced through the rain. His head moved faster than the rest of him, twitching from one angle to the next like a lizard's head tracking movement; left, right, up and down, taking his ranged opponents in with a few jerks of a head that was out of synch with the rest of his body.

"Get ready!" Only Harry's lifetime familiarity let him identify the harsh, tense voice as belonging to Legend.

Ahead of them, the Endbringer dropped to all fours with its tail whipping out behind it. It reminded Harry of massive, alien predator. Abruptly, Leviathan _exploded_ into motion. There was no other way to describe the sudden change from stillness to movement. He exploded from his stance, running not on the ground but on water itself, so fast that the assembled capes didn't even have time to scream before he was among them, striking with water and claws.

Their armbands started speaking. " _Carapacitator down, CD-5. Krieg down, CD-5. WCM deceased, CD-5. Iron Falcon down, CD-5. Saurian down, CD-5…"_

"Shit," Harry muttered. "I'm a flier, long range and impervious. I need to be on the front lines. You have your portkeys, right?"

Skitter and Tattletale both nodded. Abruptly, Harry turned and hugged first Tattletale, then Skitter. The second hug lasted much, much longer.

"Be careful, Taylor," he whispered to her. "Please."

She squeezed him back. "No promises. Be careful, Harry. Leviathan can kill even the strongest capes."

He backed away. "So, since we might all die today, can I see…"

"No," both girls said, though Lisa was grinning below her mask.

Harry laughed before mounting his staff and flying out to meet the monster ripping his adopted city apart.

* * *

A/N: *Some of this chapter came directly from Worm itself, _Extermination 8.1_ and _8.2_. I despise cutting and pasting and did as much as I could to paraphrase, but it was such a pivotal scene I wasn't able to skip it entirely within this station of canon.

Also, I know lots of people wanted the Endbringer fight wrapped up in just one chapter. It was just too big of a fight to do that. See everyone next week.


	32. Determination 2

A/N: Chap 31 review responses are in my forums like normal.

* * *

 **Determination 4.2**

The terrible truth of Harry Potter's life was that, regardless of what the Four Founders and Hogwarts desired when he was given his magic and shared a shard of his soul with the venerable old castle, his many reincarnations came about mainly because of conflict.

While some exuberant female mages would sneak into the heartstone chamber on Caldos to awaken him solely to be his wives and have his children, most of his rebirths were at the behest of whichever government was ruling Caldos at the time, and almost always in response to some terrible threat.

The Founders. Kildashri'i. Dark lords by the dozens. The Shadows. The Q. The names of the conflicts and the identity of the many species driven to wage war on the Mages or the Federation they served could have filled an entire archive data base. They fought for hatred, resources, religion or just boredom, but the end result was death. Not just his, but so many others around him.

How Harry Potter hated watching others die.

~~Simurgh's Son~~

~~Simurgh's Son~~

A crescent of water flew through the air like a twenty-foot long scimitar. The cape tried her best to avoid it, her screams of terror lost in the roar of the water, waves and rain. She looked barely older than Harry, maybe close to Canary's age.

The blade of water cut her in half, sending her torso flying haphazardly in one direction in a spray of rain and viscera, while her legs fell directly down to the water drowning the streets, all momentum lost.

" _Fierceling deceased, CD-5,"_ Harry's armband announced.

No one had time to care, not even him. Leviathan spun about on one foot like a thirty-foot tall fucking ballerina and whipped his tail around so fast the air _cracked_ with the supersonic tip of it. The line of heroes gathered on the ground to confront the monster broke into pieces. A second later the water echo in the same shape as the tail itself slammed into those heroes that somehow survived the first assault.

" _Sham down, CD-5. Acoustic deceased, CD-5. Harsh Mistress down, CD-5. Resolute deceased, CD-5. Woebegone down, CD-5…"_

The list continued.

Harry veered his staff toward the downed heroes. He couldn't think of any magic that would make a dent on a creature as large as a giant that he could deploy without killing everything else too.

"This is Mage. Send me to any injured for emergency transport."

" _Acknowledged."_

His armband pointed, not without surprise, to the line of downed heroes. He flew down and cast a simple reveal looking for living bodies, and with each live one he found cast a portkey and threw it down at them, one after the other. There were twelve capes in that defensive line—only eight were still alive when he sent them to Panacea.

He looked up in time to see Alexandria plow through a water echo with the same sound she might have made blowing through a bomb bunker, to literally clothesline the bastard and slam him down against the road hard enough that the impact made several of the surrounding capes lose their footing.

Almost immediately the monster's tale whipped up and around his own body until it garroted Alexandria's neck. He spun his hip and so doing smashed her to the ground, up into the wall of a mostly shattered building, and then back down below the water.

Dragon appeared in her massive battle suit firing missiles before attacking in person in a desperate attempt to save the most powerful of their fliers. Legend added his own compliment of firepower, as did the other flying artillery.

Harry apparated to the water almost beside the monster, within feet of where Alexandria was held down. He pointed his staff at the beast's tail and cast a vanishing charm, thinking he could vanish a portion of the creature's skin.

The magic rebounded, just like a dragon or troll, only more so. It rebounded so hard the backlash knocked him off his feet. He barely had time to climb back up out of the water before the creature suddenly shot back to its own digitigrade feet and, using Alexandria like the head of a club, whipped her right into Harry at the speed of sound.

Both of them went flying into the air. His runes absorbed the kinetic force of it, though every bone and muscle in his body hurt from the impact. However, that's not what terrified him.

As Alexandria cursed, bunched her legs and kicked off his body to launch herself back into battle, the Simurgh's song in the back of Harry's head sang a familiar song of sharp, overwhelming power. The last time he felt it wasn't in meeting Alexandria, but when he first arrived in America and met the civilian head of the Protectorate.

"I don't have time for this," he whispered, forcing his attention back to the here and now. He mounted his staff to halt his own fall, more disoriented than hurt. Without his Runes he'd be dead.

His arm band was speaking in a steady stream that took him a moment to understand. Names. Names of the fallen in a seemingly endless litany of death. " _Adamant down, CD-5, Hew down, CD-5. Strapping Lad down, CD-5. Intrepid down, CD-5_."

Harry rapped his earpiece, which was on a separate system from the armbands. "Tattletale, where are you?"

" _Northwest, the_ North Atlantic _building."_

Harry apparated right to her. She stood with a few other capes, likely Thinkers or Masters, watching the fight while getting soaked. "Where's Skitter?"

"On the street, helping the wounded," Lisa said. She looked pale and was shaking.

"I hit it with a vanishing charm," Harry said. "My magic rebounded. I get no song from it at all. What is it?"

"Not human," she said tersely. "Never human. It has a nonstandard cardiac and nervous system. When its cut, its blood seeps but it doesn't actually bleed. It's layered, no vulnerabilities that I can detect. Its skin is as hard as an aluminum alloy and it gets more dense the further into its body you go. When injured, it regenerates from the inside out, filling in tears and gashes."

Harry frowned. The entire time she spoke his armband rattled off names. Buildings lay shattered and drowned in its wake.

"It had no song," he said. "It resisted my magic."

The whole building they stood on shook as Leviathan jumped into the air as if he weighed nothing, slamming down into another formation of capes. The water echo arrived seconds later, washing away a dozen broken cape bodies.

"How did it resist my magic…?" Harry whispered.

 _He was somewhere else, another world entirely._

 _Black clouds boiled almost like flame, obscuring the twin stars he knew were in the sky. Occasionally he saw a brilliant burst of white within the cloud cover, causing the burning clouds to billow downward before belching out the flaming, shattered form of either a Federation battle cruiser, a Mage command ship, or a Shadow striker, one after the other falling through the atmosphere to crash into a world that was once a paradise._

 _Around him, thousands of Mages squatted down besides tens of thousands of Federation marines in a heavily shielded assembly point. The marines were in heavy mechanized armor attuned so perfectly to their minds that the armor might as well have been an extension of their bodies. Each suit stood ten feet tall and bristled with enough weapons to bring down a starship._

 _Gathered around them, slight and small in comparison but glowing in the dimness from the heavily enchanted armor they were, stood the Mages. In another time, another place, they might have seemed otherworldly, even elven._

 _Smooth faces stared out from mithril helmets and visors charmed not just to protect, but to tap into the subspace command channels the Federation marines were using to coordinate their battle plan. Their mithril armor was etched with thousands of runes—four hundred thousand years of advancement imbuing the armor with enough magic that a Mage wearing it could survive a nuclear assault. The magic of the armor plates shone brightly between the many darkened mechanized suits._

 _Harry Potter stood in their midst with the three surviving members of his family. He too wore the mithril armor and the visor that fed him a constant stream of information. He'd inspired and helped draw up the battle plan, but he also knew to play to his strengths. The desperate battle in orbit and the immediate star system involved tens of thousands of ships, many of which shifted in and out of their dimension at will. There was little he could have accomplished by being up there._

 _So he stood in the mud with the marines, and despite his vocal protests, his surviving three wives joined him. For the mages of the 400_ _th_ _Century, gender was irrelevant when it came to power or battle. It was difficult for the lone Mage born in the 20_ _th_ _Century to accept. He wanted to protect them even if they didn't truly need it._

 _The ground under their feet shook as the enemy approached the outer ward line._

 _Long, smooth fingers entwined themselves with his. He turned to look into a pair of viridian eyes, larger than his own, barely visible behind a visor. Ahlai, Lady Gryffindor, stood six inches taller than Harry did. The only hair on her body was a coif of violet she wore on her head, and that was hidden by the helmet. A narrow row of small, perfect white teeth were barely visible between thin, parted lips. Her chin sloped down into her long, graceful neck._

 _According to the standards of Harry Potter's first birth, she would have looked like something from a Tolkien novel—tall and thin and inhuman. Her hips were barely wider than his own; her chest almost as flat beneath her plate of enchanted armor. She was a female mage of the 400_ _th_ _Century, further removed from Harry genetically than Harry was from the Neanderthals of Earth._

 _She was over a century old and counted herself young, just like her surviving sister wives Dele and Rina, who stood on either side of her. The air about them shimmered with their shared magic. Mages of their time were unused to physical touch—magic alone was their means of contact._

 _That changed when they summoned Harry, hoping he could give them the spark they needed to resist the most horrific enemy the galaxy had ever known. Harry was a creature of touch, needing it not just emotionally, but spiritually and physically as well._

 _He squeezed her fingers before turning to look out over the charred, blackened terrain that had once been Atavan, the Mage's second oldest colony and a paradise world of the Federation in the Gamma Quadrant of the Galaxy._

 _Now it was a charnel house._

 _Silhouetted by the purple-white flames of a crashing Shadow striker, Harry could see the line of Shadow golems stalking toward them, a thousand at least, each standing fifty feet tall. There were no eyes or visible sensory organs. Some were bipedal, some with six legs or more. Federation fighters zipped below the cloud line and fired volley after volley of metaphasic torpedoes—the most powerful weapons the Federation possessed that they could use without cracking the planet itself in half._

 _The golems absorbed the punishment without pause. Any time one was damaged, it simply phase-shifted out of the dimension long enough to regenerate before continuing. That was the secret it took so many burned worlds and so many billions of lives for the Mages on the Federation Council to realize._

 _They were so caught up in the horror of what the Shadows wanted, and why they wanted it, that they failed at first to realize how the Shadows won time and again._

 _Atavan was to be the last stand of the Milky Way—their last bastion before they lost any hope of survival. The Shadows would not accept surrender, just as they themselves would never surrender. To the Shadows, all the sentient species of the galaxy were nothing more than food._

"Fifty meters to the ward line. _"_

 _The synthesized voice did not speak English. English hadn't been spoken in more eons than Harry wanted to consider. He understood it perfectly, though, because it was the language he'd been reborn into._

"Mages, do not launch until the golems are down," _Harry said._

 _Acknowledgment came not with words, but with tendrils of mental magic that brushed against his Occlumancy like so many gentle fingers._

 _The golems hit the ward line. The earth burst into a brilliant, scintillating wall of space-contracting magic that forcibly ripped the Shadow golems from their many dimensions into his own and kept them there. Behind the infantry, warp drivers accelerated ten-ton ingots of neutronium to nearly the speed of light, unleashing relativistic kill vehicles that slammed into the golems with continent-cracking kinetic energy._

 _The giants faltered for the first time, unable to shift into their dimension to recharge. Federation fighters plunged down out of the burning clouds again, and this time the metaphasic torpedoes did true damage. Harry felt Ahlai squeeze his hands as the golems began to crumble apart—being constructed weapons rather than living beings._

 _The Shadows themselves swarmed around their fallen golems. They never seemed to care about losses, only the potential to feed on the neurons of their enemies._

"All forces deploy! Go, go, go!"

 _Harry should have sent the order by telepathy alone, but his first instinct was always to speak. Ahlai, Rina and Dele echoed his order instantly across the entire fifteen-mile long battle line. Mages shot into the air, borne by their magic alone. Most wielded staffs so far beyond what Merlin created one might compare a stone-wheeled wagon with a starship._

 _Harry flew out with them, his wives around him. Their job was not to kill the Shadows—the Shadows seemed immune to direct magical attack. No, their job was simple._

 _Just like the Command ships in orbit; just like the wards on the ground, their job was to drag the Shadows wholly into a dimension where they could actually bleed._

 _Battle was joined before Harry could take a breath. Claws, teeth and deadly electrical surges snapped out from thin air. Harry used his gauntlets to guide his magic as he cast a shield with his left hand and the phase charm with the right. His attacker took form in front of him—a long, floating creature much like a giant, crystalline lobster with a stinger instead of a flat tail._

 _Their assigned marines fired instantly from the ground below, powerful disruptor beams eating away at the Shadow's atomic structure until it shattered into dust. Instantly four more took its place._

 _Harry lost all track of the battle. There was only the here and now. Claws and teeth reaching for him; a stinger that could fire a particle cannon strong enough to destroy a shuttle—Mages and marines alike screamed in fury, pain or death. He shielded and cast; shielded and cast. He shielded for Ahlai, Rina and Dele while they cast._

 _They sank to the ground, too magically depleted to expend energy flying. Still they cast. Marines fired away, their weapons glowing with expended heat. Harry heard a massive boom that flattened an entire section of the battle line. A Mage command ship exploded in the upper atmosphere like a third sun to Atavan's twin stars._

 _Ahlai screamed—an alien, keening sound. He wanted more than anything to turn to her, but five shadows struck at him. He had to fight, to survive. His whole existence—perhaps the existence of the Mage race and the Federation itself—depended on it. The Mages were the only beings who could dimensionally lock the Shadows, and he was still the most powerful of the Mages._

 _So he fought with tears in his eyes as he listened to his wife suffer, until abruptly no further Shadows came. He stumbled and collapsed to his knees._

"Report."

" _All forces report total victory,_ " the synthesized voice said. " _The last Shadow Striker was destroyed two minutes ago. Losses stand at sixty five percent._ "

"Merlin _," he whispered._

 _He felt drunk, like he was moving through molasses, when he turned to see where Ahlai had fallen. He crawled toward her through the blood-strewn mud, magically moving the hulking armored bodies of fallen marines from his path, until he reached her side. It was easier to levitate the obstacles than to walk around them, his legs were so tired._

 _She lay in the mud, the shimmer of her armor spent, while Dele and Rina held each of her hands. The fact that the Shadows in and of themselves were powerful enough to rip through armor that could withstand a nuke left Harry empty and cold inside. He'd held the first of his two wives to die on Caldos the same way as he held Ahlai now. The first two died when the Shadows attacked and nearly overwhelmed Caldos. Now, a third wife was soon to join them._

 _Her magic was spent; there would be no healing for her. He could see as much as feel the dark energy of the Shadow's weapon consuming her magic and body._

"In the name of Lady Gryffindor, I would die for you _," she whispered one last time before closing her eyes._

~~Simurgh's Son~~

~~Simurgh's Son~~

" _Debaser deceased, CD-6, Ascendant down, CD-6, Gallant down, CD-6, Zigzag down, CD-6, Prince of Blades deceased, CD-6._ "

"Harry, God damn it, this isn't the time to fucking zone out. There's a wave! Harry!"

Harry Bailey blinked himself out of the memory to see a scimitar of water flying right toward them. Shielder from New Wave was there, trying his best to summon a shield to protect them but Harry knew would fail. More in panic than calm determination, he pointed his staff at the water and screamed out a spell.

Transfiguration met power-infused water. The water burst into a tornado of oxygen and hydrogen that carried enough force to blast them off their feet, but not to kill them. Harry helped Tattletale back to her feet.

"What the fuck was that?" she demanded angrily. "You can't fugue out in the middle of a fucking Endbringer fight!"

Harry looked over her shoulder at the monster and he suddenly realized _why_ he entered the memory. Leviathan was faster than the Shadow golems, but moved with the same artificial way. Too precise, too perfect. An animal wouldn't have been so perfectly destructive.

"It's a weapon," he said, ignoring her outburst. "Leviathan. It's an engineered weapon. Not human, not terrestrial. Something built it and sent it here, it and probably all the Endbringers. A vanguard to prepare for something worse."

Tattletale stared at him, but he could see her eyes moving as she processed the information. "Fuck," she whispered. "Fuck. Harry, what do we do?"

"I…I have an idea. Something I saw in my memories. I need to get you further away, and I'll need Skitter. Close your eyes and ears."

She did exactly that, squeezing her eyes shut and covering her ears. He hugged her close and apparated her deep into downtown, hoping it was far enough away. He left her on top of one of the old buildings that had been refurbished by a now failed tech upstart. Perhaps because of his vision, he then hugged her tight.

"Please stay safe," he whispered into her ear before he launched himself onto his staff.

"Skitter, where are you?" he asked into his earpiece.

The signal that came through was obscured by the sound of water rushing and people screaming. " _Helping with the wounded. Section CD-6_."

"I need you to get to…30th and McKinney. I have an idea."

"I'm on my way."

Harry dropped down to the intersection amidst lines of police cars, terrified people _still_ trying to get to the damned shelters, and water. The cops stared at him in alarm as he waved his staff and transfigured the gathering water into twenty-foot tall walls of ice. He continued either vanishing the remaining water in the street or adding it to the walls.

He then turned to the staring cops and civilians and cast a _sonorous._ "LEVIATHAN'S GOING TO BE HERE IN TEN MINUTES. GET TO YOUR SHELTERS NOW!"

Panic turned to terror and people started screaming. One of the cops rushed toward him. "What can we do?' he asked.

"Stay with the civilians and try to keep them from being too stupid," Harry said.

He then floated into the air, wielded his staff until it pointed down, and began carving runes into the pavement. The cop stared a moment at the brilliant beam of white before backing away to help get the straggling civilians out of the way.

Harry was dimly away of Skitter arriving. "Did you have to make me climb a fucking glacier to get here?" she demanded.

"Sorry."

"What are you doing?"

"Leviathan's a fucking machine. A bio-mechanical weapon designed to kill us. Non-terrestrial, extra-dimensional. The reason we can't really kill it is because it's not entirely in our dimension. What we see is just a part of it. These runes will hopefully bring it into our dimension and make it killable."

"Lisa said you fugued out," Skitter said.

"Potter faced something similar," Harry confirmed. He continued making the runes. "Skitter, you've got to convince the other capes to bring Leviathan this way."

"Oh, is that all?" she said dryly.

He dropped down to the ground and ripped off his mask. He knew his face was sweaty but he didn't care. He walked right toward her and lifted her mask, wincing when he saw the shiner of her left eye and the cut on her cheek.

She looked confused and worried until he leaned over and kissed her tenderly, fully conscious of her many hurts. When they parted, he healed what he could.

"For luck?" she asked wryly.

"Hell no," he said. "Because you're beautiful. Because you're badass. And because I'm scared shitless and don't want to do what I'm about to do without kissing you one last…"

Suddenly she had her arms around his neck and her lips to his. The rain poured down around them and in the distance he could hear a monster roar and heroes die, but for that one, perfect moment the only thing that mattered was Taylor kissing him.

She stepped away, staring at him with an intensity that no longer scared him. "We're going to win," she said.

"Yeah."

"We're going to fucking win," she said again.

And when she said it like that, Harry could only agree. "We really are."

"Get back to work. I'll make sure Leviathan comes, even if I have to drag him here myself."

Harry nodded, rose back into the air, and started carving.

* * *

A/N-One more chapter for the Leviathan fight. And for trivia's sake, the flashbacks Harry relives are to a formative event mentioned in the final chapter of Lord of Light. The Shadow War was the tipping point for Mage ascendancy in the galaxy of Harry's birth. And maybe a formative event for Harry Potter personally.


	33. Determination 3

A/N: And here is the last chapter of the Leviathan fight. There is a very specific LOL reference for those who've read it. For those who haven't, let me know and I'll give more info in the forums for those who don't want to read the first stories. Also, if I missed your comments and you'd like a response, my forums are the appropriate place.

* * *

 **Determination 4.3**

Taylor ran toward the iceberg that enclosed the intersection where Harry was burning his runes into the cement. A month ago, she'd never have believed him. However, having seen what he could do with those runes, she knew better than to doubt him now.

Her lips tingled and the pit of her stomach felt hot. They'd kissed before, more than once, during their two or three dates. Perhaps it was the adrenaline, or perhaps the desperate urgency in his face, but for the very first time she felt that tingle she'd always read about—that people who really cared for each other were supposed to feel.

Either that, or she was just so fucking scared she wasn't thinking right.

Water slammed in waves against the glacier Harry made. She no longer bothered trying to figure out his power; whether he was right or not, magic was simply the easiest explanation of why he could change things, or fly, or teleport, or use his runes to do bullshit things like rebuild warehouses from scratch into awesome lairs and botanical gardens.

The sound of his magic behind her hummed loudly. Ahead of her, down the wide street between the mid-level buildings that tapered up in height as they approached the bay, she could see a brief glimpse of Leviathan surge by, surrounded by gnat-like heroes pelting him without obvious effect.

She took a deep breath and slammed her hand into her armband. "Hard Override. We need Leviathan at 30th and Mckinney."

Her armband immediately spoke back in a surprisingly gentle Canadian voice. " _This is Dragon. You are not authorized for a hard override. Please explain."_

"Mage is creating a trap. He and Tattletale have determined that Leviathan is an extraterrestrial, extra-dimensional engineered weapon. He believes that he can trap Leviathan wholly in this dimension and make him vulnerable."

" _How has he come to this conclusion?"_

Skitter couldn't help it; she snorted a laugh. "Dragon, I can't even begin to describe how Harry's power works. All I know is that he used magic runes to turn an old warehouse into a deluxe luxury apartment complete with water and electricity in about two minutes. If he thinks he can do this, then he can. Period. But only if we can get Leviathan to 30th and McKinney."

" _Understood. Prepare to have to explain your reasoning to the Triumvirate. You've been authorized to make your announcement. By doing so, the Triumvirate are aware that I have vetted your message. Good luck."_

Taylor took another breath and tapped her armband again. "Hard Override. All capes, we need Leviathan directed to 30th and McKinney. Coven is laying a trap we believe can harm or even kill him."

It didn't surprise her at all when Legend appeared in a blur of light. He saw Harry floating in the air burning runes into the street before turning to Skitter. _God Legend was hot,_ Taylor thought to herself, unconsciously comparing the muscular, wind-swept hero to Harry.

The leader of the Protectorate met her gaze for a moment before looking back at Harry. "Can he do it?" was the hero's only question.

A teleporter abruptly appeared with Tattletale a second before disappearing again. The young Thinker walked unsteadily over the glacier before stopping at Taylor's side. She looked at Legend a second before smirking. "Hello, dears. Legend, love the earring." She turned and shouted at Harry. "What else are you going to need?"

Without looking up, Harry shouted back. "Need Vista. And someone like Ballistic. Need to make projectiles almost impervious and on-target."

"Tell me," Legend said to the Thinker. Skitter could tell he wasn't asking about the trap. There was a quiet authority in his words. He didn't need to shout to make people listen.

Tattletale frowned intently as she listened to the Armband continue to rattle names off every few seconds.

"He's lived before," she said simply. "I don't know how, or why, but Harry's lived before. Thousands of lives. Millions. He has memories of another whole universe. He was looking at Leviathan and went into a fugue state as he remembered something. He woke up and gave me the piece that was missing."

"Which is?"

"Leviathan isn't a parahuman or a monster. Leviathan is a weapon. An engineered construct sent here by an extraterrestrial threat to weaken and ultimately destroy us. And Harry has a plan to destroy it."

A loud explosion drew their attention briefly back to the battle. "You're a Thinker, right?" he asked.

"Thinker 8. And I'm right." No hesitation, no doubt.

Legend pursed his lips in thought. "Alright. Flechette can probably help, she has a ballistic-style power and was one of my Wards. I'll send her to you."

Just like that, the decision was made. He launched into the air. Seconds later, their armbands pinged. " _Hard Override. This is Legend. Confirm, we need Leviathan at 30_ _th_ _and Mckinney at all costs._ "

Moments later, the world blurred and Vista appeared. Her suit looked filthy and sodden from rain and debris. "Someone said they needed me? Hey, what's Mage doing?"

Whatever he was doing, he seemed to finish just as a teleporter appeared with another cape with a rich purple costume lined with platinum white armor panels and what looked like an arbalest strapped to her back, and long, sharp darts hanging from her belt. Though her visor covered her eyes and nose, her chin had a light olive tone to it.

"Flechette, I presume?" Taylor asked. When Legend made a decision, things happened.

The young hero nodded. "What's the plan?"

Taylor hitched a thumb at Harry. "Whatever the hell he's doing."

Harry apparated to stand on the glacier with the rest. Rather than look at any of them, he stared down the 30th street where the capes were trying desperately to direct Leviathan.

"Mage?" Taylor asked.

He didn't respond. She tried again. "Harry?"

"We used neutronium ingots in our warp drivers on Atavani," he said absently, as if talking about the weather. "We have to walk a line between putting in enough energy to kill the golem without cracking the crust."

Taylor's chest hitched. His accent was…odd. He didn't sound British or American or Canadian. He spoke English, but an odd, washed out English free of regional inflections. She understood everything he said, but suddenly knew without a doubt this was not her Harry.

Flechette had no idea what was happening, but Vista was confused. "Why's he sound weird?"

"Because we're talking to the immortal, millions-of-years-old sorcerer named Harry Potter, not Harry Bailey," Tattletale said.

Harry blinked and looked back at her. "To-may-to, To-mah-to." He looked up at the clouds, then behind them at the various buildings. "Getting a clear line of sight's going to be an issue. If we miss, we could crack the crust."

"The crust of what?" Flechette demanded nervously.

"The Earth," Harry said. "We're going to be deploying relativistic kill weapons with enough kinetic energy to crack a continent in half. Visa, see that building over there? The one with the unicorn logo? We all need to be there without my teleportation knocking Skitter and Tattletale sideways."

With a gesture, the world contracted until the top of the skyscraper seemed to bend down like a kneeling horse, and five of them stepped onto it. A second later they stood half a mile away from the intersection.

"Taylor, can you still control your bugs down there?" he asked.

"Yes, why?"

He met her gaze. "You're going to aim and fire. I've seen what you can do using your bugs. We can't afford to miss. We'll destroy the whole northeast coast if we do."

Far below, they watched as Alexandria slammed into Leviathan's chest like a missile, physically lifting him off his feet and blasting him toward the runes. He spun in mid-air like an acrobat and landed in an echo of water even as his tale cut a building in two to send five stories of steel, glass and concrete falling into a line of heroes.

" _Argos deceased, CD-7…"_ The names kept coming. Harry stepped to the edge of the building, dropped his staff and began drawing big circles in the air, then making typing motions.

"What the hell is he…?"

Flechette's question dried up when she noticed that whatever his fingers were doing left an orange glow in the air. His fingers seemed to fly on their own, creating a strange ring of symbols flanked by thin beams of orange light two meters across, but with a half-meter open center.

When he was finished he shoved it out from him and it made an odd _clang_ sound that echoed not just in their ears, but their minds as well. He immediately started on a second, tracing the circles first before beginning on the glowing runes in the middle. Below, Leviathan jumped on top of a four-story mortgage company and launched himself into the air. He somersaulted and suddenly his tail slashed down right at Glory Girl.

The moment the tail hit, Glory Girl disappeared. " _Glory Girl down, CD-7…"_

 _Not deceased,_ Taylor thought, relieved. Harry's portkeys were saving lives.

She drifted toward him as he worked. The air in front of him shimmered despite the rain, which hit the glowing orange rings and sizzled. He finished a second and pushed it out before starting on a third.

"How many?" she asked.

"Ten," he answered without looking away from his work. "Ideally we'd have warp coils for this, I'm having to substitute magical constructs. So I need more."

She reached out with her power, but just like with her work trying to find wounded capes, there just weren't many bugs that could survive the flooding. Still, she called what few she could to the edge of her power, which that day especially seemed a little more potent than normal.

Legend plowed close to the Endbringer below, blasting it with a devastating fusillade of laser power. The monster stumbled backward, but then using its tail like a spring shot itself forward. It stopped abruptly, but a Leviathan-shaped echo of water shot forward almost as fast as one of Legend's lasers and slammed into the leader of the Triumvirate with sufficient power to throw him from the air.

" _Legend down, CD-7"_

Alexandria came then, slamming into the monster. Abruptly Eidolon arrived as well, having finished whatever previously occupied his attention. Leviathan lifted into the air a second before Alexandria slammed into his mid-section. She didn't stop, though, continuing to push the beast toward Harry's runes.

He had six of the rings done and was working methodically and calmly on the next. Beside him, Taylor hissed as Leviathan brought both of its hands forward and slapped them around Alexandria so powerfully the sound of it echoed across the city. He gripped Alexandria by her feet and hands and began to pull her apart.

"Flechette, get his attention," Taylor said. "You can do that, right?"

The hero nodded and brought her arbalest up. Vista stood at her side. "I can cut the distance."

"Do it," Flechette ordered.

Taylor watched as Vista condensed the space between them and Flechette fired.

Her fired bolt defied the laws of physics, imbued with her power to fly without friction or loss of mass, and to penetrate everything it touched. Her shot was true, slamming into the back of Leviathan's head with enough punch to make him nod.

Eidolon took the opportunity to do…something. Everything around Leviathan rose into the air—water, shattered cars, pieces of broken buildings. Just as quickly it all slammed back down again as if gravity had been trebled. Alexandria tumbled from Leviathan's hands into the water at his feet. A teleporter zipped in and got her out right before Leviathan's fist slammed into her abandoned spot.

The monster turned and stared directly across the intersection at Taylor and Flechette. "Well, that got his attention," Tattletale said. "Might as well fire again."

Leviathan launched himself into the air in an impossible, physics-defying leap that carried him _right over the intersection._

Brilliant white light lashed up from the intersection the second Leviathan crossed the plane of the runes. The creature made a low, grumbling sound that might have been a scream or rage or a statement of pain, but it was the first sound they'd heard from it. It fell straight down onto the pavement.

The ice around it shattered back into water.

"Oh shit," Taylor said. She slapped her armband. "Urgent override. We need every shielder alive here now! We need time!"

Harry didn't seem to notice. He was on the ninth ring, not moving any slower or faster than before.

Eidolon himself appeared before them, and all around the building the air shimmered as the monster's water attack slammed into his shield. More shielders arrived by teleportation at various points of the skyscraper.

Harry finished and stepped back. Ten glowing, two-meter wide rings hung in the air just over the edge of the building. Harry pointed to the closest. "Flechette, place one of your darts in that driver. Don't imbue it yet."

She did so. Harry lifted his staff back up, frowned with the effort, and before their eyes the dart began to grow until it was half a meter wide and three meters long. It still looked like solid, heavy metal.

"Make it as impervious as you can," Harry said.

She did so with a touch. Harry looked to Taylor. "You can do this."

She nodded and sent her bugs down. Leviathan was thrashing within Harry's wards. Even as she watched, she could see parts of the magical walls shimmering against the titanic strain of the Endbringer. Two mosquitoes managed to land on his head, too small to be meaningful or even felt by anyone but her.

She pointed the laser. Harry assumed an archer position, his left arm extended. With a groan of effort he drew his right arm back. As he did so, the rings stretched out with a harsh, mechanical buzz and assumed an intense glow. "Vista, open a road!" he screamed, as if holding the world on his shoulders.

Vista did as asked, reducing the distance between them.

Tattletale hit her armband. "Urgent! All capes evacuate the intersection now!"

One of the runes in the cement below somehow caught fire under the water before it shattered. A sliver of the magical wall failed. It was only large enough for Leviathan to reach a tail through. But that was enough to cut a nearby cape in half.

"FIRE!" Taylor screamed.

Harry grunted with effort, and suddenly the air between them caught fire with a release of kinetic energy. If not for Eidolon's shields, Taylor realized they'd probably have been vaporized. As it was, she found herself thankful for the tinted lenses in her mask.

When the fire cleared, they saw Leviathan thrashing almost like a fish out of water, except…except….

"Holy shit," Flechette breathed.

The beast's head was gone, reduced to a massive crater between its shoulders that oozed a thick, green-black ichor.

"Again!" Harry barked. "If we don't kill it now, it'll escape and regenerate!"

Flechette placed another dart in the ring. Harry engorged it with obvious effort before the hero imbued it with her power. Taylor landed more bugs in the crater that used to be the still moving Leviathans' head. The insects were instantly caught in the ichor, but lived long enough for Taylor to point the laser. She turned away, aiming by power alone.

"Fire!"

"Arrghhh!" Harry screamed as he pulled the rings out and unleashed another dart. Again, the release of energy was astonishing. What buildings remained from the first strike completely shattered from the second, topping away in clouds of crushed cement that the constant rain quickly washed out of the sky. Only the army of shielders kept their own building standing.

When the fire cleared, the monster's torso had split down the middle, exposing a core of white-hot material just above the base of its tail.

"That's it, Harry!" Tattletale shouted. "If we hit that, it'll die!"

"Flechette, last one!"

She did as instructed. Harry visibly swayed as he enlarged the dart. Taylor tried landing bugs on Leviathan's core, but it was so hot they died before they could get close. She pointed the laser at it by sight alone. "Fire!"

Harry screamed again, and then staggered backward into Flechette's arms just as the last dart surged down so fast that it looked almost as if it were moving backward up from Leviathan in a burst of energy that leveled the entire side of town. When the fire cleared, they saw Leviathan's core cracked in the middle, its glow quickly fading. The shattered body of the monster no longer moved and the shimmering walls of light faded.

Overhead, the clouds parted to reveal a ray of afternoon sunlight.

"Oh my God," Tattletale whispered. "I can't…oh my god. We did it. We _fucking_ did it!"

Taylor, though, was looking up. With the first ray of sunlight came another source of brilliance in the sky. Scion himself hovered far above; a brilliant luminescence surrounded him as he stared down at the shattered remnants of Leviathan and the broken city that was his graveyard.

Scion's golden skin was the source of the illumination, made even more brilliant by the blood- and mud-splattered white unitard he wore. Long black hair whipped in the wind from his head, while his bearded face gave no sign of emotion as he stared down at the devastation that marked most of the Docks and the eastern side of Downtown as a whole.

Without any hint of emotion, the most powerful being in the world disappeared into the same sky he appeared from. Taylor stumbled back from the edge of the building, physically and mentally exhausted, and turned to find Harry.

He lay prone on the roof, surrounded by a kneeling Vista, Flechette and Tattletale. His mask was off and blood was pouring from nose, mouth and ears. She didn't understand the blood—she'd never seen him bleed before. Frowning, she walked to his side and knelt down. "Harry?" she asked.

"He's alive," Tattletale said in a low, tense tone. "Alive, but hurt. He pushed his power too much. We need to get him to Panacea."

Naturally, that's when the roof tilted violently under their feet. Taylor had just a moment to look up and meet Tattletale's terrified expression before the building began to collapse under their feet.

~~Simurgh's Son~~

~~Simurgh's Son~~

 _Harry sat motionless at his desk in the ancient chamber that housed the headmasters of Hogwarts on Caldos for so many eons. Every other building from the original colony had been ground to dust by time except the ancient castle, which was held together by the living magic of Harry's own soul, and the heartstone of Hogwarts herself. He was as much a part of the castle as the students who had walked its halls for so long._

 _It wasn't a school any longer. Mages no longer learned in classrooms, but through direct telepathic implantation from their elders. The castle remained as a monument to Harry himself, and served as his home during each of his rebirths._

 _It felt particularly cold and empty on that particular day._

" _Hello, Harry."_

 _He blinked and looked up at a figure he knew intimately and yet didn't know at all. He'd experienced this memory so many times, but he couldn't ever remember this beautiful woman in it. She was blonde, lithe with youth but with the curves only maturity could bring. A beauty spot marked her lip, seeming to bring out how luscious they were. She did not look like a mage of the late 400_ _th_ _century. She looked like a stunning woman of 21_ _st_ _Century Earth, even down to the jeans and simple sky-blue sweater she wore._

" _Amanda." He didn't realize he knew her name until the word emerged from his lips. "We could have really used your help."_

" _The Q don't interfere in mortal affairs."_

 _Harry snorted. He felt as if he were reciting the lines in a play, but it didn't stop him from speaking. "Of course they don't. Unless the mortals are doing something you don't like."_

 _She frowned, a delicate expression on a physically perfect face. "You're angry at me?"_

" _I am heartsick. I am angry at the universe, not at you. But it won't matter. Dele and Rina are not going to last the year, and I'll be able to sleep then as well."_

" _Until next time."_

 _Harry sighed a genuine sigh and dropped his face into his hands. So many memories of so many lives. So much death._

" _Why do you keep fighting, Harry?" Amanda had moved around the broad wooden desk that was the only furniture in the cold room. "Why do you come when they summon you? You have power enough to withstand the call."_

" _I have a 'saving people' thing."_

" _Yes." Her smile looked sad as she leaned over and hugged him. "You are forever the hero, damned by your own courage and morality."_

" _Damned," Harry agreed. He leaned into the hug, unable to help himself. The scent of her overwhelmed him, reminding him of his youth. Perfectly human hands caressed his cheeks as a terrible, eons-old grief ripped a sob from his chest. Unable to help himself, he turned into her and buried his face into her chest as he wept. She gently ran her hands through his hair, just like Hermione did so many eons ago._

 _When the worst of the storm passed he looked up at her, and she down at him, and before he knew it they were kissing. Before he knew it, their clothes were gone and he was surging into her body on the desk, her legs wrapped tightly around his waist. She met his gaze squarely as they made love, until with a final release he collapsed onto her, paralyzed by the overwhelming nature of his life._

" _Why me?" he whispered into her chest._

" _It was my fault," she whispered as she ran her hand gently through his hair. "A terrible mistake I made. A creation of mine made in a moment of doubt and loneliness. We birthed this universe into existence, Harry. You and I, just like this now. As much as I am the mother, you are the father. Earth exists because you thought of it at the moment of creation. Humans exist because your life was an imprint on the very genome of existence._

" _But it took so long, and I was so lonely. So I tried to make more Q. Only, they weren't Q. They were not tied to the existence of this Universe. They were tied to life itself, feeding and reproducing at the expense of whole worlds. In my desire for companionship, I made a race of monsters. I can't stop them, I can't intervene as I am. I don't exist as a separate being any more, Harry. I_ am _this Universe. But you could. And so I gave them you. My precious Forever Mage. I'm so sorry for everything I've done. You're my hope for a hopeless world. You are my love, and my sacrifice. And I know you'll win, because it's who you are."_

~~Simurgh's Son~~

~~Simurgh's Son~~

Harry woke up stiff and uncomfortable. His orientation confused him—had he fallen asleep standing up? He moved to scratch his nose but found he could not. It wasn't that he couldn't feel his arm, only that he couldn't move it. In fact, with one rush of tension, he realized he couldn't move at all, not even his head.

With his eyes alone he tracked across the small room where he was secured with metal straps and what felt like two-tons of foam. Directly across from him was a one-way mirror.

He was back in the same damned containment cell they used the last time they captured him.

"Oh, come on!" he shouted.

* * *

A/N: Come on, folks. This is Worm, whose taglines included, "The Road to Hell is Paved in Good Intentions" and "It gets Worse." In fact, go to the tropes page and Worm is the definition of that trope.

But, as I've said before, I promise an unqualified happy ending. The will be troubles and travails, and our heroes will suffer at times along the way, undoubtedly, but there _will be_ a happy ending.


	34. Interlude: The World Gone Insane

A/N: Chap 33 review responses are in my forums as normal. Also, a reader asked for a rough timeline in my Chap 32 review responses, so I posted something there as well. Thanks for reading.

* * *

 **Interlude: The World Gone Insane**

Brockton Bay was shaped much like a giant letter C. At the top of the curve was the Boat Graveyard and the remnants of the actual working docks that, before the emergence of the Endbringers, did a healthy business as the largest port in New Hampshire and the 14th largest in the United States.

With the scuttling of so many ships in the main channel, large shipping dried up, leaving only local shipping interests viable and able to navigate the graveyard. The trans-Atlantic traffic, such that survived Leviathan, simply couldn't make it to the docks.

The area called the Docks encompassed more than just the docks, though. They included the Boardwalk and the old, defunct ferry station, a market that once sold everything from fresh fish to the latest electronic equipment from Japan, and two old neighborhoods dominated by fishermen and dockworkers. The rough, blue-collar neighborhood in the 80s and 90s was now dominated by Japanese immigrants seeking a new start following the destruction of Kyushu Island, only to find a homeland haunted by racism and hatred in the form of E88. Historically, it should not have been a surprise. Each wave of immigration found the same, from the Irish in the 1800s to the Italians to more recent waves.

Was it any wonder that the ABB thrived?

Further south, where the Boardwalk ended in what was once a narrow beach rose downtown, a relatively tight-packed area of skyscrapers crowded together to take advantage of the basalt up-thrust that provided sufficiently strong bedrock to support their weight. Such was necessary in a city built over an aquifer.

South of downtown were the once influential neighbors, often with private beaches. Every house had a pool, a tennis court, or a combination of the two.

Eric Bautista knew all this from the after-action debrief he had the morning after he woke up in Brockton Bay Memorial, having been healed by Panacea after Leviathan took him out. He received the report not from his own second-in-command Prism, but from Miss Militia of Brockton Bay.

She had the haunted look he'd become so very familiar with over the years. It was the look all capes had when they saw what remained of their city after an Endbringer attack.

The undeniable fact that the destruction could have been much, much worse did not make what actually happened better. Miss Militia was too professional and simply too good not to have the detail at hand on just how bad it was.

The initial tsunami, which always served as Leviathan's herald, struck the Docks and the southern-most beaches and expensive properties first. Whole neighborhoods were simply erased, as if they never existed, while most every structure in the docks was wrecked badly. As bad as that was, however, the worst damage was in the southern end of the Docks and downtown, where the energy of the massive tidal wave elevated water far above sea level because of the relatively shallow bay. Waves penetrated almost a mile inland, reaching in some cases all the way to the western city limits.

The immediate coastal areas were struck so hard that no trace of Brockton Bay's beaches survived. The boardwalk was simply gone—only the stone piles that one held it up remained. Both the Northern and Southern ferry stations were crumpled into kindling.

That was just from the tsunami that announced Leviathan's approach.

Leviathan emerged inside the bay itself, near the transition of bedrock that marked the border between the southern end of the Docks and downtown. More water surged inward with his arrival, killing any civilians who hadn't escaped, and take the first capes out.

What Leviathan started downtown, Mage finished. The intersection of 30th and McKinney was just two blocks away from the geographic center of downtown. Though the Brockton Oil building survived the initial strikes thanks to Eidolon's shields, everything east of it that initially survived Leviathan's attack was shattered into dust by the energy released from Mage's devastating attacks.

Included in the destruction was the most seaward Endbringer Shelter. Which was the source of Eric's frustration.

"There were almost two thousand people in the shelter," Miss Militia said in closing as she closed up her paper report. "Most of whom were families downtown who were unable to evacuate further inland. Our Thinkers confirmed that there was a better than even chance the shelter would have survived Leviathan's attack with minimal casualties if not for…Mage's actions."

"Let me guess, it's already been leaked."

"Video and audio," Miss Militia acknowledged. "One woman was Facetiming her daughter from inside the shelter when it was destroyed. The daughter had it on YouTube a second later with pleas to anyone to let her know what happened. And then someone in the Thinktank released a copy of their initial report. The people know that a teenaged villain created and deployed a weapon that could have destroyed the earth's mantle."

Eric closed his eyes, both in sadness at the girl's loss and the loss of so many other loved ones, and regret over how they died. "Holding him violates the truce," he said. "As tragic as it is, normal rules don't apply during Endbringer attacks. Russia tried nuclear weapons on Behemoth in the middle of Moscow. They killed more of their own people than Behemoth did."

Miss Militia's frown was so intense it darkened her already dark eyes. "Mage isn't the government. He killed more capes than Leviathan did. He came close to wiping out the entire eastern seaboard. Washington is considering reissuing the kill order. The President has already scheduled a press release to talk about it."

Eric lowered his hands to hide their rage-induced shaking. He struggled to keep his voice even because he knew it was not Militia's fault. "He's in custody only because he exhausted himself killing an Endbringer."

"I know."

Eric sighed again. He couldn't tell for sure what Miss Militia's feelings on the matter were—she had a very good poker face. "What about other matters? I'm assuming relief supplies are already en route?"

Further proving how good her poker face was, Miss Militia managed to hide the scowl she most certainly wanted to show. "E88 and the ABB both have been aggressively poaching incoming convoys. With the identity of all E88 members revealed and their material assets seized, Kaiser obviously doesn't care about the rules any more. Lung…never cared."

"Options?"

This time she did purse her lips, the frustration overcoming even her professional demeanor. "Dragon relayed a note to us from the PHO. Coven briefly offered transportation and a safe dock and distribution point for all relief supplies, but withdrew the offer immediately when they realized we were holding Mage and Skitter. They were using their lair as a shelter for almost three thousand civilians, using their own emergency supplies for them."

Eric couldn't help laughing. He knew he was frustrating his colleague, but he couldn't help it. He laughed at the sheer absurdity of the situation. It was not a happy sound at all.

"They got him back last time. I understand they have a very powerful Stranger in their group now. If we hold him, we may not be able to keep him, which will just alienate them even more."

"We've put full Master/Stranger protocols in place," she said. "That said, we're stretching resources to do so. Unfortunately, the Protectorate headquarters rig suffered damage. It's washed ashore and we can't pull it back out into the water until the bridges are repaired. We're holding him at the Rig for now."

"I'll want to see him. Do we have any other members of Coven?"

Miss Militia shook her head. "When the building they were on collapsed, they activated their personal teleportation devices. Flechette and Vista are both under age and so received similar devices from Mage. They suffered minor injuries only. As you say, we managed to capture Mage only because of the presumed Truce and Skitter's concern for his health."

She stood and gathered her papers. "I…for what it's worth, we only lost for under-aged capes. Gallant was killed immediately and arrived dead. Likewise, for the others."

"Because of Mage."

She nodded before turning to leave the small, private room in Brockton Memorial that he'd woken up to just two hours previous. The windows to his room were boarded up, since very nearly every piece of glass in the city shattered when Mage fired his weapon. Even so, he could see blue skies peeking out from between the wooden planks.

He stood and stretched—Panacea truly was a miracle worker. He felt better physically than he had in years. While he still wore his mask, since members of the Triumvirate were never supposed to unmask, his actual costume lay draped reverently over a chair. Modesty, such that he had, was preserved by a thigh-length hospital gown open in the back.

 _Good thing Arthur isn't here,_ he thought with a wry smile.

He felt a brush of air against his bare backside and spun around. All things considered, it should not have surprised him to see _her_ standing in his room in front of an open portal. She even sported just the hint of a smirk on her beautiful, Mediterranean features.

"Convenient timing," he muttered. He had no doubt, given the supposed nature of the woman's power, that she arrived when she did exactly for an unobstructed view of his ass.

She neither confirmed nor denied before she stepped into the portal. He dressed quickly before following. He felt the portal close behind him only because of the change in air currents. The long hall he walked through could have been on any number of alternate earths, with a dizzying maze of other rooms and halls, each identical to the last. If not for the woman in the suit guiding him, he'd have been lost. This was not how he normally entered.

He arrived at the same conference room as always, even if by a different route, and found Alexandria already there. Doctor Mother sat on the far side of the table, while the Number man sat at her left, opposite the two other members of the Triumvirate. The woman drifted over the stand behind the founders of Cauldron as Legend sat. Somehow, he knew she would find a way to defeat him if he'd ever become a threat. He couldn't imagine how, but she would.

Alexandria's helmet sat on the table in front of her. The star-shaped scar at the corner of her right eye was the only imperfection on her face. She was beautiful, Legend considered, but hers was a cold, vicious beauty. The beauty of a predator made so by purity of purpose as much by any aesthetic sense.

He was angry at these people—people he'd considered friends for years. He fought to hide that anger, knowing it would do no good.

"Alexandria. Recovered?"

She nodded. "Leviathan always goes for my neck. Fortunately I can hold my breath for a long time."

"Good." Legend crossed his legs and studied the others. "Where's Eidolon?"

"He said he had to take a sabbatical," Doctor Mother said. "He was unhappy that we could not risk giving him another treatment. More importantly, something about Leviathan's destruction bothered him deeply."

Eric tried not to snort at the thought of Eidolon being anything _but_ unhappy. "So, why am I here? I like to think I'm a healthy man, but surely seeing my ass in a hospital gown was not your girl's motivation, Doctor Mother."

The scientist didn't even blink. "Serendipitous timing, I'm sure," she said dryly. "We wish to discuss the death of Leviathan."

"Very well."

"Have you spoken to Mage since the fight?" Doctor Mother asked.

Legend stared at her intently. She'd voiced her question to be as nonchalant as possible, but given their summons he didn't see the point.

"No. I missed the end of the fight personally. Given that someone took it upon themselves to arrest him while he was seeking medical help during the Truce, I'm sure I'll have plenty of opportunity."

The Number Man cleared his throat. "What he did was impossible."

The man's voice sounded thin, almost breathy. It was easy to forget that he was a former member of the Slaughterhouse 9. "Even with the help of other capes, it should have been impossible to accelerate a physical object so close to the speed of light like he did. It was a power, perhaps. Powers have been known to violate physics. However, what we observed as not a direct application of powers—rather he used his power to _create_ a device that did it."

Legend shrugged. "According to Panacea, Mage is not actually a cape. He ascribes his power to magic, as you know."

"We need him in the Protectorate," Alexandria said. Like everything else, it came out as a statement of undeniable fact.

Legend smiled without humor. "That didn't exactly work well for us last time, did it? Trying to force the issue will just push him even further away. We failed him too many times for him to trust us, even me. And detaining him for actions he took jeopardizes our entire Endbringer strategy."

The Number Man typed something into his lap top before adjusting his glasses.

"The numbers have pointed to an endgame scenario for years. It was, of course, the reason Cauldron was founded. We're projected that if the Endbringers continued doing the damage they've been doing at the current rate, civilization would not be sustainable. We'd be forced to withdraw from damaged and dangerous areas, populations would condense making even more devastating targets for future Endbringers attacks. And that's without considering the possibility that they achieve something big in the interim. We've talked about the crisis scenarios: Behemoth triggering a nuclear winter, Leviathan obliterating or tainting the world's fresh water supply. However, in all that time we never considered the possibility of just out-right destroying the Endbringers. Until now. Which begs the question if we should reconsider our strategy."

"So why don't you send your pant-suit bogeywoman to go bring him in?" Legend asked. "He's already locked up in Brockton Bay, it should be quite easy."

Said bogeywoman's face remained blank; no longer smirking.

"Contessa cannot see Mage," Doctor Mother admitted. "Nor can any of our pre-cogs see him directly. He falls outside our power."

Legend slowly rose to his feet. "Then why the fuck did you break the fucking truce!?"

Doctor Mother stared in surprise at the sudden outburst. Alexandria had also risen to her feet.

Only Contessa remained seated. "It was necessary," she said, speaking for the first time. She sounded young.

"Why? For whom? To accomplish what?" Legend demanded.

"I don't know," Contessa admitted. "I can't see him. The Path told me it had to be done."

Legend leaned forward. "Then maybe, just maybe, it really is magic? Regardless, I'm not sure what it is we wish to accomplish by detaining him. Why am I here?"

"The President wants Mage contained or dead," Alexandria began…

"The President wants what you tell him to want," Legend sneered. "Don't blame Washington when we all know you're pulling their strings."

"Fine," Alexandria snapped back. "The President just wanted him dead. The White House has its own thinkers, you know. I want Mage contained. The boy respects you. Talk to him. We need him in the Wards. Failing that, he will be removed as a threat one way or the other."

Legend had known Alexandria for many years. He knew better than to think she was a warm, compassionate person. In fact, she was one of the most coldly calculating individuals he'd ever met, which is why he was the one ostensibly in charge of the Protectorate, while she in her civilian guise ran the PRT. He knew from her expression alone that if Mage wasn't in the Wards, Cauldron would Birdcage him at best, kill him at worst.

And do the same to those around him.

He found his attention drifting back to the bogeywoman that Doctor Mother called Contessa. "Is controlling him part of your vision, or are you all here because you just can't stand to have an uncontrolled variable?"

"Legend," Doctor Mother began.

"We _failed_ him," Eric said, for the first time letting some of his anger show. "Again and again. He doesn't trust me because he _shouldn't_. We're so caught up in percentages and odds that we've lost sight of the Individual. That one stubborn bastard who will simply stand up and say, 'I prefer not to.' And given powers, all it takes is one individual to change the world. For the better or not."

"Well shit, now he's quoting Melville," the Number Man muttered.

"A definite 'no', then," Alexandria said darkly. She stood. "Very well, I'll…"

"Do nothing," Legend said.

She paused, staring at him with an utterly blank face.

 _Time to double-down._ "You'll do nothing to Mage or Coven. You've already done enough. Instead, what you'll do is free Mage immediately and remove Coven from the villain registry. You'll secure a pardon for Canary from Washington, and you'll let me handle them from now on. We don't have to control him to be able to work with him. I'll relocate to Brockton Bay permanently."

The other aspect of Alexandria's cold calculating nature is that she rarely if ever got mad. Impatient, yes. Quite often. But never mad. He met her gaze squarely and knew that brilliant computer of a brain in her head was calculating away.

"The President himself has demanded Mage be held accountable for the deaths he caused."

"Here's a statistic for you, then," Legend said. "Leviathan normally kills between twenty and forty percent of a city's population when he attacks. According to Miss Militia, because Leviathan died as early in the fight as he did, Brockton Bay lost less than eight percent of its population—just under 10,000 people. That's a terrible number, it sickens me, but it's a fraction of how bad it could have been. Harry also is personally responsible for saving all but four of the underage capes there, including my own Ward, Flechette. It's tragic those people died, but it's ludicrous to pursue charges against the only cape in the world who's been able to kill an Endbringer."

Rebecca didn't budge. "I cannot make a unilateral decision without destroying the Protectorate's role in America."

"You mean its perception."

"They are one and the same."

"People need someone to blame," Doctor Mother said simply. "In ancient times when a disaster struck it was not the gods people blamed, but those perceived to have angered the gods. Mage killed a modern god, and people died as a result of that. Leviathan was what he was, blaming him does nothing. But blaming Mage gives people an outlet for their loss. His detention is out of our control unless we purposely bring him in."

"And you don't want him here against his will because you can't control him." Legend glanced at Contessa before standing. "I am the leader of the Protectorate. I will not support charges against him and will publicly fight against them. But I also know that prosecution is outside my permit. Do what you have to, but do it without me."

He stood and walked out not along the path he took to arrive, but through the normal labyrinth he'd learned. The back of his neck twitched in anticipation of a blade that never came. He knew that at the end of the day he was replaceable. However, it appeared he hadn't pushed too much, at least not yet.

He emerged from a doorway onto an abandoned oil rig in the middle of the ocean, thousands of miles away from civilization. In seconds he was flying toward Brockton Bay, his whole body transforming into light as he did.

In moments he came into view of Brockton Bay, and the tension from his meeting with people he'd known for years but rarely considered his friends melted before sadness at the sheer devastation. The fact it could have been worse did not make it better. Studying the damage, in times past, Eric might have borrowed Nietzsche's famous quote, but the fact is that surviving an Endbringer did not make anyone stronger. It left them weakened and even more likely to perish in the next battle.

Rather, as he flew over the city, he preferred another of the philosopher's quotes this day: "To live is to suffer, to survive is to find some meaning in the suffering."

The only movement was from rescue and recovery crews, most of whom were National Guard units from across the northeast. Occasionally he saw a few costumed capes among them. At various points where the ground had been swept clean, he could see bodies laid out in straight lines. Some were exposed not out of disrespect, but because the teams had run out first of body bags, and then of blankets.

He returned to the Protectorate Headquarters, propped up on the shore of downtown. Beyond, the devastation seemed like a blight to his eyes—buildings so utterly shattered many times not even the foundation remained. Geologists reported that the basalt up-thrust itself was cracked, though had stabilized so far.

Even the buildings that remained standing were structurally compromised, with glass windows having been blown out and foundations severely damaged by the last strike that killed Leviathan but also shattered the bedrock below him.

People needed someone to blame—let it by the right person.

~~Simurgh's Son~~

~~Simurgh's Son~~

Paige had no idea what she was doing.

Like the rest of the people taking shelter, she'd stayed inside Coven's lair and watched in fascinated horror as the tidal wave swept around and even over the whole structure without a single drop of water coming in. She screamed right along with most of them, only calming down when she realized that Harry's promises of the shelter's strength proved true. Because of Harry, they survived devastation that swept everything else around them away.

Somehow, though, because she, the paraplegic girl named Jess and…wasn't there someone else? Regardless, they were in charge of the three thousand people taking shelter in their lair. And she had no idea what to do. She could always _tell_ people what to do, but the thought didn't just terrify her, it repulsed her. She hated her power, not just for how it ruined her life, but how it had the potential to ruin so many more.

Then came Taylor's father. Danny Hebert was not a handsome man by any stretch—tall, gangly and with a slight hunch to his shoulders, Mr. Hebert looked more like an old insurance agent than someone who spent his life on the Docks.

Yet, when he spoke, people listened. Without asking, but also without being bossy, he started making suggestions about where people should go, and who should do what, and Paige just didn't know enough to countermand him, and even if she did, she didn't want to use her power to do so.

"Shouldn't we be telling people what to do?" Jess asked. "It is kind of our place, you know?"

Only, it wasn't Jess who spoke, but a projection that looked a lot like a supermodel Page had seen on a magazine in their breakroom.

"The people listen to him, and he seems to know what he's doing," she said. "I doubt Taylor would object."

And so, through apathetic delegation, Danny Hebert became the crises manager of Coven. They said nothing through the worst of the storm, though several people screamed when something exploded with such force it made their ears ring and the ground shake violently under their feet. Two more times the explosions went off before everything went quiet. The clouds overhead broke to allow shafts of sunlight to lance through the windows, illuminating the lines of blankets and sleeping backs that filled the top floor. The lower level was just as crowded.

After waiting another hour to be safe, Paige stepped outside and gasped at the destruction around them. All the surrounding warehouses were crumpled like soda cans, but what really shocked her were the boats from the boat graveyard. One looked like an ocean liner and hung over the pier like a giant, cracked baseball bat.

She turned around and saw that the lair, and Taylor's Botanical Garden, were both untouched and gleaming in the late afternoon sun. It looked as if both had been recently washed. They stood out starkly from the stench of leaking oil and dead sea life that surrounded them.

Hugging herself, Paige made her way through the maze of debris until she got a clear look at downtown. Or what remained of it—half the sky line she'd grown accustomed too was simply g

one.

"My God," she whispered.

"Yes, it was devastating, wasn't it?"

Paige blinked and spun around. An attractive woman stood beside her in a beige pantsuit, wearing a fedora that shielded her eyes from the sun overhead. "I…where did you come from?"

"Not far," she said. "Did you or your people have any injuries?"

"No, thank goodness. Do I know you? What was your name again?"

"It doesn't matter," the woman said.

Paige barely had time to think before she realized the sting in her neck was a syringe, and suddenly her whole body was so heavy she couldn't even think.

~~Simurgh's Son~~

~~Simurgh's Son~~

Legend chose to have the press conference in New York, at the Protectorate Headquarters there. Prism stood by his side nervously, clearing her throat as if she were battling a cold.

"Are you sure about this?" she asked. Her face was hidden behind the crystal facemask, all but the down-turned lines of her lips.

"I refuse to let someone else pay for my decision," he said simply. "I gave the order, if anyone should be held accountable, it should be me. If I stay within channels, Mage won't be freed. I have to make it public."

"Are you sure he's worth it?"

Legend looked back at Prism, surprised at the question. "This isn't just about Mage, Prism. It's about justice, and fairness. It's about the Endbringer Truce. I personally failed him; the Protectorate failed him. And now they're threatening him again for something he did with my blessing. No, it's not just Mage that's worth it. It's my own conscience that's worth it."

He stepped to the podium that dominated the press room of the New York Protectorate Headquarters. The hundreds of members of the press settled down when they saw he was ready.

"I've come today to speak about the tragic events in Brockton Bay, New Hampshire," he began. He started to say more when he felt a sting behind his back. He tried to turn to see what Prism had done, but he could not move. It wasn't that his body became boneless or week; rather every one of his joints locked, holding him as still as if he'd been covered in containment foam.

Abruptly the air in the middle of the conference room blackened and his ears rang with a deep buzzing sound like a million bees swarming around him.

 _My God,_ he thought. _That's exactly what's happening._

Thousands—possibly millions of insects burst through all the vents of the conference room, sending reporters into terrified screams. The bugs ignored them, though, and formed a cloud right in front of Legend. The buzzing and chirping synchronized into words.

" _Release Mage or the President will be next._ "

With that terrible statement, the insects swarmed right at Legend. Unable to activate his power, move his joints or even close his mouth, he never had a chance. The insects shot down from the air like an arrow right between his teeth. Abruptly he found he could move—whatever device locked his joints disappeared, but it was too late. The insects crawled up his nose and literally chewed through his cheeks to get past his teeth. He tried to fly away, but he still couldn't activate his power.

He was dimly aware of screaming from the audience and Prism's frantic cries, of flailing and crying to scream but not being able to breath to do so. In seconds, though, it was lost in the roar of his own labored heartbeat.

 _Oh God, I'm so sorry Arthur. I'm so sorry, Keith._

The world around him narrowed to a tiny pinprick of light before even that was lost to the darkness.


	35. Desperation 1

A/N: Chap 34 review responses are in my forums like normal. There were a lot. Love it or hate it, thanks for reading.

* * *

 **Desperation 5.1**

Taylor stopped.

She stopped breathing; stopped moving; stopped thinking. She stopped and stared down from the rafter of the main conference room of the Protectorate Headquarters of New York at the swarm of insects that buzzed with increasing agitation around the room.

Hundreds of reporters lay flat on the ground, some prone, others curled up in fetal positions, all in a desperate attempt not to be swarmed. She didn't care about any of that, though. All she cared about was the unmoving body of Legend on the stage. Even from her distance, she could see and more importantly feel insects still flying out of his gaping mouth—still feel them crawling inside his unmoving lungs.

She'd killed Legend. She _killed Legend._

Because Canary ordered her too.

"There she is!" The voice was Prism's, standing at the podium that seconds ago saw the death of the leader of the Protectorate and one of the most powerful and popular heroes in the world. Almost as soon as the words came out of her mouth, Prism multiplied, cloning herself again and again. Each clone rushed off the stage for the rafter where Skitter stood frozen.

 _I killed Legend._ The thought paralyzed her. Below, PRT agents and other capes rushed toward her, and she knew just from the rage on their faces that if she survived, it would likely not be intact. Prism, though…Legend's second in command did not look enraged. She looked determined.

 _She did something, right before I attacked. Legend could have fought off my swarm._

One of Prism's clones pulled a gun; the dozen others all followed suit. The first bullet felt like a punch to Taylor's chest plate, but Harry's improved costume easily held the bullet at bay. Instead, what it did was force her to move. She ducked down just in time to avoid a flash of laser fire from another cape she barely even caught a glimpse of.

Her mind kicked into overdrive. Below, the swarm dove again, targeting the capes and PRT agents. The rafter ran into solid wall on either side, but set three feet above were more air vents—she'd come through the one to her left and ran back to it now. With flies framing the opening in her senses, she dove through headfirst like an Olympic swimmer, if they still held the Olympics anymore. Within she began crawling frantically, while behind her she felt her bugs dying in droves as more capes began to deal with them.

As she crawled and continued to attack the capes in the main conference room, she thought of how she arrived. It wasn't obscured—she had clear memories of waking up in a well-lit room across a small table from Canary after the building they were on collapsed at the end of the Leviathan fight.

Her friend had a collar around her neck. Her eyes and nose were red from her tears.

"I'm sorry, Taylor," she whispered. A second later the collar zapped her. She screamed and jumped in the chair.

"What the fuck is this?" Taylor demanded. "What about the fucking truce?"

"Please go and kill Legend at his news conference in New York," Paige said through her sobs. "Please threaten the President next if he doesn't release Mage."

There was no power in it, and almost as soon as Paige finished talking the collar went off again. She screamed and thrashed in agony. Taylor tried to rise to her feet to do something, anything, but she abruptly realized she'd been handcuffed and ankle-cuffed to the metal chair, which was bolted to the metal floor. She reached for any insects, but could not sense any in her range.

The torture came to an end. Paige slumped in her chair, gasping now just in a desperate attempt to breathe. Taylor could see burns around her neck where the collar shocked her.

"Please don't make me do this," Paige sobbed.

Even that prayer was met with agony. Taylor relaxed back in her chair as a cold rage burned in her chest.

"Do it," she said in a flat, clipped voice. "They won't kill you—they can have Panacea heal you and then torture you again and again until there's nothing left but what they want. Just do it."

Taylor could see how the muscles in Paige's cheeks and neck twitched as she struggled to look up. After a moment, she failed and let her head hang. But the voice that emerged lashed through Taylor's mind like a whip.

" _Please go and kill Legend at his news conference in New York. Please threaten the President next if he doesn't release Mage."_

The door opened and a single PRT agent walked in—a woman of non-descript appearance. She wore dark gray tactical gear with the PRT badge on her shoulders and a helmet with a clear plastic visor.

"I'm assigned to help you get to New York," the woman said.

Opposite Taylor, Canary sobbed as she slowly sank down until her head rested on the table.

The PRT agent leaned over and unlocked all of Taylor's cuffs. She noticed only then that she was still in costume, and that it was stiff and smelled from days of unwashed sweat and seawater. The PRT agent reached behind her and handed over Taylor's mask.

"The news conference is in less than three hours."

"Then we'd better go. Are we flying?" Taylor asked. She was perfectly aware of how her friend was sobbing on the table; of how they had been betrayed by the so-called heroes. None of that mattered. She had to kill Legend; she had to do it for Paige.

"A helicopter is standing by."

They were not in the PRT headquarters building. In fact, they emerged from the back of what looked like a tractor trailer on the side of an old, cracked parking lot in what might have been a mall years ago. Now all she saw an expense of cracked cement. A sleek, unmarked helicopter sat on the grass nearby, its rotors already starting to spin.

They flew directly to one of the four clover-leaf like helipads atop the breathtaking New York Protectorate building in New Brooklyn. They were met on the pad by a woman in reflective white and silver—Prism? Wasn't she Legend's newest protégé?

Below her, she sensed bugs. Half a million or more. She didn't understand how so many were gathered so quickly, but she immediately took control of them and started bringing them up the air vents within the building. She didn't question why it was so easy.

The PRT agent stepped off the helicopter and motioned for Taylor to follow.

"Where is the conference?" she asked immediately. She gave no emotional consideration to what she was about to do, only thinking on the hows and wheres.

"The main conference room is on the ground floor," Prism said. Taylor noted the young woman had red eyes and nose herself, as if she'd recently been crying as well. "The laser defense grid in the vents have been deactivated. You have twenty minutes to get into position."

There was no discussion about after. Taylor knew with the same certainty that Legend had to die that she too would be killed. It just didn't matter—she had to kill Legend.

She did just that—and now that she'd complied with Canary's compulsion, she was free to face the consequences of her actions. Those consequences were death—Prism alone could not afford Taylor to confess what her role was.

Wait? _Laser defense grid?_

"Oh, fuck me," she muttered. She started crawling backwards even faster than she crawled forward. Ahead of her, she saw a brief flash as one of her flies vaporized, as if from the corner of her eyes. The lasers weren't visible—they didn't have to be. Being invisible actually made them _more_ effective.

Desperate now, she gathered her insects into the opening of the vent, and then ordered them into a faintly humanoid shape along the rafter that ran across the back of the room. She could hear more shouts as she caused the decoy to drop down to the floor and run out of the conference room. With the remaining bugs she took a headcount—a dozen journalists and two PRT agents remained.

She swarmed them without mercy or hesitation. She couldn't afford either at this point. Their screams accompanied her as she emerged legs-first from the vent onto the rafter. It was still a good twenty foot drop. However, a pair of her flies felt cloth—she turned and saw across the rafter a long banner marking a past anniversary of Behemoth's arrival in Brooklyn.

Her steps on the rafter were as sure as her bugs could make them—she knew each surface intimately. With a flying leap she gripped the banner, thinking in the back of her mind that it would rip and let her down gently.

It didn't rip—the fabric was so thick she had a hard time keeping a grip on it. Instead she wrapped her legs around the edge and let herself slide down until she hit the floor. Outside the conference room she could hear more screams because of her decoy.

She paused only long enough to rip a headpiece and a baton off the nearest writhing PRT agent before she ran across the room. Her decoy was heading right, so after ensuring no one was in the hall she turned left.

The second after she emerged, the very same damned Brockton Bay PRT agent who escorted her to New York barreled around a corner directly in front of her. The woman didn't have a foam gun out—she had an assault rifle. Even worse, she seemed to be expecting Taylor. She brought the gun up in one smooth motion and fired five shots in the space of a heartbeat.

Again the bullets felt like hard punches, but none penetrated her Mage-enhanced armor. She responded by throwing her liberated baton at the woman's face. The agent was well trained and ducked, but while the baton missed her, the fist-sized swarm of wasps hit dead on, easily going under her visor for her eyes, mouth, nose and neck. Her aborted screams allowed two fist-full of flies to swarm down her neck.

Whoever was pulling the strings wanted to make sure she had enough weapons to kill Legend; they obviously failed to anticipate what else she could do with them. She rushed the woman and pulled her into the bathroom. Taylor began stripping the agent of her helmet and gear even while the older woman thrashed and clutched desperately at her neck.

Taylor stripped out of her own armor, using the increasing number of insects around her to help. The agent had stopped moving by the time Taylor was stripped; she quickly began pulling off the agent's clothes and putting them on herself. Once dressed, she struggled to pull her costume onto the unconscious body, intimately aware that her decoy was on the third floor and easily surrounded. She'd summoned a second in the conference room, hoping to buy a little more time.

She glanced at herself in the mirror without her mask. Her long, curling brown hair was the first thing she saw. "Shit."

Without hesitation she gathered her locks up, and using the dead agent's own utility knife sawed her hair off just inches from her neck. She fought back tears as she did so. It wasn't enough that they turned her into a murderer—she felt like she was losing the last bit of her femininity with her hair.

Despite the emotions it caused, she didn't hesitate. From her own backpack, now on the agent's body, she pulled out a roll of duct tape and secured the hair just inside the back of her mask before putting it on the swollen, bloated face of the now dead woman.

 _I've just committed murder. Not like Legend—this was all me._

Worse yet, she didn't pause even for a second as she pulled the mask over the agent. Taking a deep breath at what she knew was going to hurt like hell, she summoned five of her wasps and, gritting her teeth, had them sting her face and neck repeatedly. She ordered them to inject just enough venom to produce good welts, but not enough to risk anaphylactic shock—she hoped.

With shaking hands, she lifted the agent's gun, put the barrel under the chin strap of her old mask, and fired. At the same moment, she released all her bugs.

She had only a heartbeat to turn and throw up before the door burst open. Five agents, Prism and a brute cape with orange skin and the build of freight train rushed in.

"Agent Dower, what happened?" Prism asked.

 _The uniform_. Dower's name badge was on the breastplate.

"Skitter attacked me and dragged me into the bathroom," she said. Her voice sounded alien even to her own ears. "Wasps and flies. My rifle was ineffective against her armor, but I was able to break free in hand-to-hand. She went for my weapon but I was able to get a shot in under her chin."

She could feel her own face swelling from the venom—her own throat was sore and raspy. Prism didn't even look twice—the dead figure on the floor had the armor. More importantly, she had Skitter's hair around what remained of the head, while the figure in Dower's uniform did not.

"Good work. We saw one of her distractions collapse just when we heard your shot." She tapped an earpiece. "Control, this is Prism. Skitter is down. Skitter is down. Get emergency services in here to treat the journalists. What's the infirmary look like?"

" _Full,"_ a male voice came over. _"We have fifty wounded with significant insect bites. Recommend we move any more offsite for treatment. New Brooklyn Memorial is two blocks away and ambulances just arrived."_

Prism took a look at Taylor, still convinced she was Dower. "Can you breathe? Looks like she got you good."

"It's getting harder," Taylor said, though she made sure to stay at attention.

"Go. Come back right after for your treated."

Taylor had no idea if PRT agents saluted or not. Unsure what to do, she nodded firmly and then made a show of stumbling. One of the agents caught her.

"Got you, Dower. Come on. Ma'am, I'll go with her."

"Good man, Sachs. Come on, Crusher, let's see what we have here."

Taylor didn't look back as she let the taller, broad-shouldered PRT agent help her out of the bathroom. She wasn't even sure if it was a woman's bathroom or not, and thought it odd that she cared.

In the hall, more journalists were being assisted out by PRT staff, or in many cases carried on stretchers. The effect of Taylor's power was sobering—she wondered how many people she personally killed.

 _Besides Legend._

Ambulances and PRT vans already lined the edge of the shore across the retractable bridge that connected the headquarters to New Brooklyn. Triage stations were set up on the grounds with dozens of PRT medics and paramedics on site.

The agent named Sachs led her to a PRT medic who took one look at the welts on her face and throat and removed a large needle. Without a word of warning, he jammed the needle into Taylor's thigh and held it there until the drug was completely out. Taylor felt a mild sting and a slight rush of heat to her cheeks, but nothing else.

"Should be fine in a few hours," the medic said. "Have her wait over by the ambulances and we'll check her out after the epipen's had a chance to work."

"Right, thanks." Sachs continued to hold Taylor as they walked toward the waiting line of ambulances. "So, you took out the bug girl. This is going to look good on the resume, no doubt." They passed over the bridge into the city proper. "So, think you got a promotion coming?"

The moment they were off the artificial island, Taylor felt more bugs. She felt a wasp nest in one of the trees lining Ocean Drive and summoned the entire nest.

"Yeah," she whispered. "Think so."

She felt Sachs stiffen. The swelling in her throat had already begun to decrease, easing the pressure on her vocal chords. It came out close to her normal tone, which was nothing like the low contralto that Dower spoke with the few times she deigned to speak to Taylor.

Sachs turned to stare at her, wide-eyed, just as a dart of wasps shot up into the mouth he was about to call an alarm with. She switched their positions, moving her shoulders behind his now gasping arm so that it looked like she was supporting him. The wasps were not just inside his mouth—she had them stinging the inside of his throat and crawling all the way down to his lungs.

He staggered and made horrid retching sounds as he began suffocating. She looked up at the nearest paramedic and called out. "Help, we have an emergency!"

The man ran toward them, joined a second later by his partner. The two helped Taylor get Sachs to a stretcher. "What happened?"

"Skitter," she said. "Bugs got in his lungs. He was barely breathing when we found him."

Sachs eyes were bulging and he was desperately shaking his head while reaching for his firearm, but already his black skin had a near purplish hue from the lack of oxygen.

"We need to go!" the lead paramedic said.

Taylor helped the two into the ambulance and then climbed in herself. The second paramedic was a woman who barely reached Taylor's shoulders but looked old enough to be her mother. The male climbed into the driver's seat and seconds later they took off.

"Help me get the tac vest off!" the woman said.

Taylor complied, taking the opportunity to remove his firearm as well. With an odd detachment, she watched as the woman tried her best to save a man Taylor herself killed. The paramedic did a tracheotomy, but it was no use. Sach's lungs were swollen and filled with fluid as well. He fell still, unable even to expel his last breath.

"I'm sorry," Taylor said as she removed Sach's baton and clubbed the woman hard in the head.

"Hey, what's going on!" the driver said.

Taylor stepped over the fallen woman and put Sach's pistol to the driver's head.

"This is what's going on," she said. "You're getting me out of New York. You cooperate, and I give you my word you and your partner won't be harmed. You try anything, and I shoot your partner first."

"Who the fuck are you?"

She pulled off the helmet as she knelt down. "My name is Skitter. And less than fifteen minutes ago Prism and her partners forced me to kill Legend. I have no doubt they've put a kill order out on me, so I have nothing left to lose."

Wasps began flying out of Sach's mouth and lungs and settled on the female paramedic. Taylor would know the moment she started to stir.

"You think you're going to get away with this?" the man said.

"You'd better hope so, because if I don't your partner's going to be the first one to die."

He didn't say anything more as he turned onto Ocean Drive, once known as the Belt Parkway, and began the long, arduous drive through and ultimately out of New York City. After half an hour, just as they came into sight of Jamaica Bay, she felt the female paramedic stirring.

"What's your partner's name?"

The driver, who gripped the wheel so hard his knuckles were white, turned to glare. "Why?"

"Because 'female paramedic' gets old. First name only. What is it?"

"Belinda."

Taylor blinked. "Belinda? Really? What's yours, Archibald?"

"Yasin."

Taylor blinked and reassessed her first impression of the young man. He was pale, but realized the tone of his skin was a shade more brown than her own.

"Yasin. Belinda. Here's the plan. I really, _really_ don't want to have to kill anyone else today. That agent back there was the third person I had to kill. So, we're going to keep driving until we're completely out of New York. Maybe to Norwalk or Fairfield. We're going to leave Belinda there with the ambulance, steal a car, and you're going to drive me back to Brockton Bay."

Yasin frowned. "Why not just drive yourself?"

"I just turned sixteen—I have no idea how to drive a car."

Behind them, Taylor felt from her wasps that Belinda was trying to grab something.

"Belinda," she called. "I have a dozen wasps on your right now. I can feel what you're doing. If you cooperate, a promise you'll get out of this alive. If not, I'll shoot you right now."

"You'll have to shoot me too," Yasin declared. "Then who will drive you?"

 _Yeah, probably shouldn't have admitted that._

Yasin saw the doubt in her face and pounced on it. He slammed on the breaks and pulled the ambulance sharply over to the side, bouncing the unbelted Taylor against the dash with the vehicle's sudden change of momentum. Belinda didn't hesitate and reacted with surprising violence as she launched herself into the driving area right for the gun Taylor had in her hand. She completely ignored the wasps Taylor set to stinging her, not even wincing as she stretched her petite body across the space that separated them to latch both hands onto Taylor's gun wrist.

Amidst the flurry of honking horns and angry shouts from drivers all around, Yasin brought the ambulance to a halt in the middle of the highway. Belinda was twisting Taylor's wrist painfully to get the gun away. As soon as he stopped the vehicle and put it in park, Yasin joined the effort, eliciting an angry, terrified scream from Taylor.

Outside, from the reeds and sandy beaches that separated the highway from the bay, tens of thousands of hornets, wasps, beetles and flies of every description burst into the air. Taylor's range seemed almost infinite, driven by her terror and the knowledge that if the PRT caught her she would most assuredly die.

While the air filled with every variety of flying insect found in the surrounding square kilometer, the sand darkened as every crawling insect and arachnid that lived in the area responded to her terrified summons. Ants, beetles, spiders and other bugs swarmed over the sand as Taylor desperately fought for control of the gun. Even crabs came.

She lost—the two adults were simply stronger than she was. Belinda twisted her wrist so badly her fingers jerked, letting Yasin easily rip the weapon away from her. He spun it around with startling competency even as Taylor started falling out of the ambulance. He fired almost immediately.

She felt something strike her right shoulder around the edge of her ill-fitted PRT armor, almost as if she'd been hit with a baseball bat. The force of it spun her even as she fell backward, so that she landed on the pavement on her right side, causing the pain to flare even worse. The instant she fell, every flying insect she'd gathered swarmed into the ambulance.

For a second she could only lay there as pain surged like waves from her shoulder. She could feel tears in her eyes but shook them away violently. In the ambulance, the two paramedics screamed. Meanwhile, a carpet of beetles and carpenter ants were slowly but surely dragging out the gun that Yasmin had ripped from her hand.

She wasn't even aware that the ground insects had made it into the ambulance. But yes, looking at the tires she could see long, thick black lines of insects stretching inside. Yasin and Belinda weren't screaming any more, though Belinda continued to thrash about inside.

The ants and beetles brought the gun right to her hand. Sobbing at the pain her effort caused, Taylor forced herself onto her knees and grabbed the gun. She staggered to her feet and looked south.

A line of people were filming her with their phones. Their cars were lined up along the side of the road with open doors. She had no mask, only the stolen PRT gear. Plus, of course, she'd just been shot.

The flying swarm gathered over head. She could see the eyes of spectators bulge as they realized their danger, but it was too late. She started staggering toward the now backed-up cars as her insects surged ahead as her vanguard. Most people turned and ran in terror, jumping out of their cars in the process.

One woman nearby couldn't—she was tugging at her infant's car seat and sobbing in terror, which made her fingers even clumsier. Taylor surrounded the SUV the woman drove, along with several others, and walked right up to her with the gun in her left hand.

The woman saw her and crumpled onto the ground, her hands clasped together in prayer even as she cried. "Please, please! Please don't hurt my baby! Please!"

Taylor simply had no more tears. "Get up and climb in," she ordered. "If you cooperate, I promise no one will be hurt."

Sniffing and blubbering, the young mother did as she was told. Taylor, meanwhile, climbed into the backseat with the baby. She collected only a small fraction of her insects—stingers and biters and flies, and had them fly into the spacious back cargo area. The SUV was large and looked expensive.

The woman climbed into the driver's seat. Taylor, wincing in agony, pulled the door shut beside her. "Drive. Set your GPS to Brockton Bay, New Hampshire, and drive. You get me there, I promise no one will be hurt."

"You won't hurt my baby?"

Taylor's heart thudded. "Not if you cooperate."


	36. Desperation 2

A?N: Chap 35 review responses are in my forums like normal. Read at your own risk, a lot of folks just really don't like this arc at all. And now, to see what's going on with the other member's of Coven.

* * *

 **Desperation 5.2***

When Lisa opened her eyes, information flooded her brain in such volume her eyebrows hurt and her scalp felt like it was being ironed. Such was the price of overusing her power.

Below she saw the impossible core of Leviathan cracked open, proof that sufficient energy could be imbued even in an insufficient vessel if enough speed were applied. Below that, she saw molten stone and concrete causing the flood waters of Leviathan's attack to billow up in clouds of steam. Evidence of the sheer energy imparted by Mage's last shot.

She felt the roof of the building under their feet lurch precariously. Eidolon shielded them against the immediate shockwave, but could do nothing against the cracked foundations of the eastern section of downtown.

 _Bedrock cracked. Aquifer seeping into stone. Building collapsing round us._

 _Mage down. Overused his power. Skitter falling on him with portkey to hospital._

 _Alexandria nearby, watching. Watching._

 _Not helping._

 _Eidolon watching._

 _Not helping._

 _Building collapsing, ten seconds before surface too unstable and we fall. Portkey will take us to Brockton Memorial. Alexandria knows where portkeys go._

 _Mage just killed an Endbringer. A villain. Not under control. Not helping._

"Oh shit." She jumped toward a wide-eyed, terrified Vista. "Get us out of here, now!"

It was a comment on Vista's training as a Ward that she responded without hesitation. Behind them, Flechette screamed as she lost her footing and fell with the rest of the roof. Lisa caught a last glimpse of the New York Ward disappearing as Mage's portkey zipped her to safety.

Then she had to close her eyes as Vista violated physics in a casual fashion. They tumbled into filthy, waist-high water at street level half a mile from the building. Tattletale spun around, her hand still on Vista's shoulders, as the venerable old Brockton Oil tower crumbled to the ground in a cloud of ground cement dust that billowed all around the dead heart of Brockton Bay.

"Something's wrong," Tattletale said urgently. "They're not going to honor the Truce, not with Mage," Lisa said.

Vista glowered. "But why? He killed an Endbringer! He…"

"There's something else, something bigger," Lisa said. "I don't have all the data, but they don't think they can't afford to let him take credit for this. They can't let him be a hero. I don't know why for sure. You need to go back to them and be a Ward."

"But…but!"

Tattletale gripped the younger girl's shoulders. "Vista, listen! Mage adores you, you know that. But he and Skitter have probably been captured by now. We can't protect you! If they think you're still one of them, you'll be safe. And maybe you'll be in a position to help him. Please, go!"

"What about you?"

"Mage lifted the invisibility from the lair before we left so the refugees could find it. Alexandria will be watching it. I can't afford to go there for now. Just go and be safe, please!"

Lisa noted the tears in the other girl's eyes, but also the clenching of her jaw as she decided. The world bent around them, and seconds later Vista was gone.

Lisa ripped off her domino mask and gloves while looking around desperately. She found what she wanted after only a few minutes of looking—Captain's Tower, a high rise condo far enough away from downtown to have survived Leviathan's death. It still boasted some of the most expensive real-estate in Brockton Bay, which would prove perfect for her needs.

The lobby and first two floors were ruined by flood waters, which were quickly receding to reveal the damage within. Lisa waded into the building confident it would have been evacuated. She reached the stairs and started climbing. The lower floors would have been the less expensive, and so she got off on the fourth floor.

Immediately she saw she wasn't alone. The walls were tagged by ABB symbols, and one of the taggers was still in the hall with a can of paint. He saw her immediately and shouted something in Japanese.

Seconds later two more men came out—young, thin and hungry looking. One had a knife. The other carried a bat. In the post economic collapse of the Endbringer era, guns were expensive.

 _Tattooed. Inducted members of ABB. Have raped, killed or otherwise earned those tattoos._

 _Women are objects to be used and discarded. If they leave me alive, they will do so only after hurting me badly. No outrunning them—they will pursue._

Her mind calculated her odds even as her body worked on autopilot along the only path that had the best hope for survival. She smiled at them, careful to make her smile more inviting than predatory. Skin color was less important to these boys than tits and a pussy. They wanted sex, they didn't care about the particulars. She sauntered toward them, very pointedly lowering the zipper of her costume to reveal cleavage.

 _Harry could only wish he were here to see._

The thought made her deeply sad, but she dared not let the feeling reflect on her face. The men made no effort to reach for their weapons as she lowered her zipper all the way down to her navel, revealing a long expanse of creamy skin. Their eyes were locked like targeting systems on the creamy swells of her breasts.

So they did not see her unclip and remove the Beretta 9 mm that Harry obtained from the evidence locker room. The men had only seconds to realize their danger before Lisa fired. Her power guided her aim with terrific accuracy, while at the same time forcing her to see and understand the horror she perpetrated on each of the three in horrific detail as they fell back dead of single shot wounds between their eyes.

The shakes and the pounding in her head came immediately after. She holstered her weapon and decided to go up one more floor. She found a long, carpeted hall that had only a few doors on each side, since each floor only had ten apartments, five on each side. She simply walked down trying doors. The first unlocked door obviously belonged to a man; she tried again and found a second that had belonged to a family.

 _Young couple, techies._

 _One child in second bedroom, new bassinet, more toys than she will ever play with._

She stripped from her costume without hesitation, shoving it into a laundry basket in the master bedroom closet. The woman's size was taller than her, but only just. She ignored the hanging clothes and looked for boxes or bins.

 _Pre-baby clothes. Hopes to fit in them again someday. Never will._

The hanging clothes were too large, but the boxed clothes were a better fit. Still loose in some areas and tight in others, but close enough she didn't care. Lisa pulled on a pair of the woman's jeans with a belt to secure the size-too-large pair, but gave up on the woman's Taylor-sized old bras and found a nursing bra that actually fit. Over that she pulled on a sturdy Yankee's sweater. A search through the closet found a pair of hiking boots that were a size too big, but multiple pairs of socks made up for it. With the flooding, it wouldn't matter anyway.

Most importantly, though, she found black hair dye and a pair of scissors.

"It's not like I haven't gone underground before," she said to herself as she started working.

~~Simurgh's Son~~

~~Simurgh's Son~~

Unlike the last time he was captured, Harry had no visitors—Wards or otherwise. Legend never came to check on him or try to guilt him into the Wards program. They fed him, after a fashion, but only if you called having a mechanical arm lower from the ceiling and stick a tube into his mouth 'feeding'. To their credit, it tasted a lot like a slightly gritty milkshake, so he wasn't going to complain too much.

He would have preferred a King Burger, though.

Time blurred and he found himself reliving Potters' memories. War dominated Potter's existence, but those weren't Harry's favorite memories. No, his favorite memories were of the children. Potter had so many, over so many varied lifetimes, that toward the end before the Milky Way died one of his wives estimated that every Mage in the galaxy could trace at least some of the ancestry back to one or another of Potter's various lives.

Children seemed unlikely for Harry Bailey, though. He might have escaped Coil, but it seemed the Universe and God herself were conspiring together to make sure his life sucked ass.

Least he wasn't going to die a virgin.

He never saw anyone or spoke to anyone when the roof over his cell suddenly opened. He couldn't crane his head back to see the sky overhead, but he did feel a rush of cool Spring air with just the hint of rot from the devastated city. He managed a brief glimpse of the city at night—only small clumps retained power—most of the eastern half had no power yet at all.

Then his whole cell was inside another room, which he supposed in a dark mood avoided the problem of having to release him from his constraints. He heard clamps clang shut and felt his stomach dip as the plane or whatever he was in surged into rapid motion.

 _They aren't even bothering to drive me this time._ After two days of captivity he had given up on hope of rescue. Taylor had been with him—chances were they had her too. He hoped Lisa got away, but he couldn't count on that. At least Paige, Jess and Dinah were safe back in the lair.

He hoped.

There was no clock or reference to know how long the flight took. He could feel when the plane banked sharply several times before losing altitude. He half-expected the screech of tires on a runaway, but of course the plane had hover capabilities. Forward momentum came to a complete halt and a second later the craft dropped two feet and came to a halt.

The floor under his cell opened and he was lowered down onto a vast, seemingly endless stretch of cement inside a room so huge he could not see any walls at all. He could see small circles of light from overhead lamps, but nothing else. A giant mechanical claw moved just inside his peripheral vision and gripped the whole portable cell.

The arm lifted him from under what he now saw was an obvious Tinker-made jet. The ceiling rose perhaps thirty feet above, and like the floor seemed to stretch on forever.

Harry could only watch as his cell was carried by the arms toward a huge monitor that hung down from the otherwise featureless ceiling. A CGI face of a woman appeared—a face so utterly ordinary and blank it was almost striking. Speakers to either side of the almost football-stadium-sized monitor blared to life.

She sounded Canadian. Harry kept waiting for her to say 'about'.

"Prisoner 721, codename Mage. PRT powers designation Brute asterisk, Blaster asterisk, Mover asterisk, Shaker asterisk, possible Master asterisk. Individuals reading or viewing this log are directed to see pages four through nine of prisoner's file for particulars on powers. Recommended protocols were properly carried out with containment foam and steel frame, force field containment of hands. Chance of escape following interment in the Baumann Parahuman Containment Center rests at a fairly steady .004601% with some gross deviations for possibly unknown power variations. Within acceptable limits. Hello, Mage."

"Hey, Dragon," he said. "So, what did they convict me of this time?"

"The deaths of three thousand civilians in an Endbringer Shelter that was destroyed when you killed Leviathan."

Harry felt his eyes bulge. "Really? There was a shelter? I passed the plan by Legend and Alexandria and Eidolon both helped. Why didn't they say anything?"

"Alexandria and Eidolon both indicated they were unaware of the lethality of your weapon. Legend, unfortunately, was assassinated by Skitter this morning in a misguided attempt to free you."

Harry wanted very much to puke.

"That's a load of bollocks," he managed to say. "Skitter would never have hurt Legend. He was the only decent person in the entire fucking Protectorate! How could she even kill him? Legend can shoot wide-beam lasers that could knock out every bug she had."

"I'm afraid I don't have answers for you, Mage. Skitter also killed a journalist, two PRT agents and a pair of paramedics during her escape. She threatened the President of the United States, and so a Birdcage order has been issued for her."

"Just like Coil," Harry muttered. "Well, fuck you and your fucking Protectorate. Least Canary's safe, and Genesis and…"

"I'm sorry, Mage, but I processed Canary this morning. If it helps, I placed her in cell block E with Lustrum. It was my hope Lustrum would protect her."

"But…but…" Harry stopped. He just stopped as he realized how completed and thoroughly screwed he was. "You know your own Protectorate killed Legend, right? If Skitter did it, it was because Canary made her. Maybe they tortured Paige into doing it, who knows. But Skitter knew I…I loved Legend. He was the only one who ever cared. She'd never hurt him on her own. I just…."

The worst part about it was that he couldn't shrug or move or anything. He could only blink back tears than ran down his face.

"You know what? I'm sorry I killed Leviathan. The world deserves Endbringers. You all deserve the hell the world has become. I don't care what God wanted when she reincarnated me into this fucking life, you can all just fucking die. Just send me down the chute already."

"I'm sorry, Mage." Worse yet, he believed her. He just didn't care.

The CGI face frowned before going blank. "The Baumann Detention Center is situated inside of a hollowed out mountain, the walls of which are lined with layers of a ceramic of my own design, each such layer separated by volumes of dormant containment foam. If you punched a hole in the outside of the mountain, you'd only wind up with more foam than you knew how to handle.

"That's the mountain. The prison itself is nicknamed the Birdcage because it is suspended in the center of the empty mountain, hanging only by the same network of tubes that supplies prisoners and food to the cell blocks. Both the interior of the tubes and the interior of the mountain itself are vacuums. Even if an individual were to have powers allowing them to navigate the vacuum, I have three thousand antigrav drones in position at any given time, laying dormant in that lightless void, waiting for any signal, motion, energy or air leakage to awaken them. Once awakened, a drone will move to the location of said anomaly and detonate. Many of my drones contain a loadout of containment foam, but others contain payloads designed to counteract various methods one could theoretically use to traverse the vacuum. Some are quite lethal."

"These are not the only measures I have taken, but it wouldn't do to inform you of everything I have done to secure this facility. Know only that even with your teleportation ability your chance of successful escape is negligible, and the chance of you dying or being maimed for attempting it is much higher."

"Understand that while I do retain control over the structure and the ability to observe those within, enabling me to respond to emergencies such as natural disasters, you will not be able to manipulate this to your advantage. I will not, cannot intervene should a hostage be taken, or if an individual should threaten or perform damage to vital or luxury resources. There was no other way to run the prison effectively than to have you police and protect yourselves. I stress: nothing you do can convince me to free you. The elevators to the Baumann Detention Center go one way. Down."

"I will be depositing you in the elevators now with your current cell intact. You will have only the existing oxygen inside the cell. Should you slow or stop the lift, or attempt to scale the interior of the tube, I expect you will likely fall unconscious, suffer brain damage or die for your trouble. A counteragent for the containment foam will be applied as you descend, so that you are free before you reach the bottom."

The mechanical arm moved him to a spot on the cement floor that looked just like the others. The floor suddenly dropped away in four perfectly square leaves that received his cell with an odd _slurping_ sound. His stomach surged up almost into his throat as the cell began to drop.

He could sense odd permutations of space as he went, much like what Vista did. He didn't take much to imagine that the birdcage existed within condensed or expanded space. Tinker powers were as bullshit as his own, really.

Inside his mind, he felt ancient thoughts stirring his own, merging as they sometimes did. Since his vision after Leviathan died, he accepted that he and Harry Potter weren't necessarily one and the same, though he was kind of thankful he didn't have to go through all the bonding shit. It was kind of fun getting to know a girl the old fashioned way instead of insta-magic _pow_ super-sex. Not to say he was against super-sex, it just felt like cheating.

But what he was now realizing was that he was just seconds going to find himself in an unescapable prison filled with the most violent, most powerful supervillains in the world. He was still sixteen. He was going to have to be ruthless to survive the brutal, primitive jungle.

He barely had time to close his eyes and hold his breath when the spray began dissolving the containment foam. He felt the metal ribs that held him against the board unclip and retreat into the back of the holding chair. And then he stopped moving.

Cautious and confused, Harry pushed himself forward until he emerged in a small room with curved, smooth white walls. He was just in time to see a cheap cardboard box shunted from a space above his head onto the floor.

A quick search found three sets of identical orange jumpsuits, a carton of cigarettes ( _really?)_ plus a generic tube of toothpaste, soap and shampoo.

"Everything a growing boy needs," Harry muttered.

There was only one entrance or exit from the room, and movement from that opening drew his eye to see a man half a head taller than Harry wearing bright orange pants, but otherwise who was barefoot and bare-chested. Dragon-themed tattooes covered almost every inch of that exposed chest.

 _Lung?_ All Harry could think of was: "What the hell are you doing here?"

Lung rolled his shoulders, flexing muscles Harry knew for a fact he didn't have. "You are Mage. The Bug Girl is your minion."

"Not sure she'd agree with the 'minion' part, but we were in the same gang."

"The television says you killed Leviathan," Lung continued, as if Harry did not speak. "You and the bug girl. Already those here view you as powerful."

Harry stood stock still, his mind trying to catch up from the transition of losing everything he cared about to having a conversation with a psychopathic man-dragon. "I suppose."

"This is not the first prison I have seen. There are four ways one can survive a place such as this. First is to join one of the gangs or groups in charge. Before, I could not do this because I was known to be half Japanese, half Chinese, and there was no gang willing to include such a person in my first prison."

"Er, sorry to hear that…"

"Nor is it possible now, for I am too used to being in charge to bow and scrape for any length of time without losing my patience. The second option is to be somebody's bitch. They give you their protection in exchange for the most base of services. This has never been an option for me."

"I can see that, sure."

Lung stared hungrily at Harry. "The remaining option is to find the strongest man in the prison and kill him for no reason.. In such cases, one demonstrates he is too dangerous or unpredictable to be fucked with. Of course, I do have reason—you are friends with one who harmed and insulted me. For this alone I would kill you. But this way, everyone knows that Lung killed the cape which killed Leviathan."

"Sure," Harry said. "Why the fuck not? Killed an Endbringer, saved a city, then got arrested and thrown in the Birdcage for it. So, why not have a fucking duel to the death with some shit-head wannabe Nobunaga. Wanna lay down here, or do you need room to display your awesomeness to all the little-brained peons you think you need to impress?"

Lung snorted. "Big words for a little man. I…"

Harry blasted him out of the room, pumping as much magic into the blasting charm as he could. Lung flew backward, a surprised look on his tattooed face. Harry followed, feigning disinterest despite his rapidly beating heart, to inter a large hemispherical area that rose up four floors from where he stood. Each floor was lined in rails, and leaning on those rails were hundreds of prisons who appeared to have gathered for the show.

Behind him, he saw a giant tube that rose up past the ceiling, bisected by a wall. That was what he'd come down, he gathered. He placed his box on the ground and turned to see Lung ramping up already, cloaked in flame and eight feet tall.

With his runes, Harry knew Lung couldn't kill him. As strong as the villain was, he had only muscle and fire. Granted, it was a lot of muscle, and a ridiculous amount of fire. However, Sundancer had far more firepower.

That said, Harry was limited on what he could do to actually beat Lung either. He could kill him—he'd never tried a killing curse, but he knew it existed and had no reason to think it wouldn't work. However, he also knew hundreds of far nastier curses as well. He knew curses that would turn Lung's blood to ice, his bones to glass or force him to regurgitate his own intestines.

He definitely wanted to get the fight over with, before Lung got to big.

" _Avada Kedavra!"_ Sick-green magic flashed from Harry's hand and struck Lung in the center of his chest.

For a brief moment, his fire went out and the cape staggered back, an expression of agony on his face. Harry waited for him to fall dead. Instead, Lung roared and exploded into flame and scale, suddenly shooting up to twenty feet in height, bristling with scales, flame and even fucking wings.

Harry stared, genuinely confused. "Huh, that's new. Wonder if I did it wrong?"

* * *

*Parts of this are from Worm, Interlude 6.x, by Wildbow.


	37. Desperation 3

**A/N:** Chap 36 review responses are in my forums as normal, including a brief discussion of what's going on with Lung. We'll get back to that scene next chapter.

Finally, I'm not much on trigger warnings. I choose to believe that my readers are mature and intelligent enough to decide what and when they read, and its that more than any specific content that makes me mark many of my stories "M". However, I will also admit that the first half of this chapter was both dark and difficult, both to read and write. It constitutes the harshest point in Taylor's personal journey. I believe her actions are completely within her established character, but that doesn't make it any easier.

* * *

 **Desperation 5.3**

The scream jerked Taylor awake, though just barely. The inside of the vehicle was filled with a cloud of agitated insects. With a half-formed thought, she calmed them down and returned them to the back of the SUV.

They'd rolled to a stop on the side of the highway. She had no idea where they were, only that there was a constant stream of traffic going in the opposite direction, while very little traffic headed north.

The woman finally stopped screaming, but the baby didn't. Taylor blinked back gum from her eyes and saw the baby writhing and red-faced with infantile rage and fear.

"What happened?" she demanded.

"You tell me!" The woman screamed before she covered her face. She was young, probably mid-twenties, with a round face framed in lustrous black hair. Hispanic, though she had a Boston accent. "Your fu….bugs just went nuts!"

Taylor's eye lids felt so heavy. She tried to sit up, but so doing caused agony to lance out from her shoulder.

 _That's right, I've been shot._

Blood loss. She could smell it in the air, and see it coating her arm. Her own blood. She felt dizzy from it.

"I've been shot," she said aloud, for the woman. "I must have passed out from blood loss. When I did, I momentarily lost control of the bugs. You have a smart phone, right? Find the nearest urgent care clinic."

"So you can kill more people?"

Taylor sighed. She hated the idea taking hostages, it never worked out.

"If you get me to a clinic, you and your baby go free. I'm more interested in not having the Protectorate kill me than I am in hurting you."

"You promise?"

Taylor didn't bother answering—it took all her energy to just keep her eyes open. With a worried glance back at her still-screaming infant, the woman removed her phone and did a quick search.

"There's one two miles away."

"Where are we?"

"An hour south of Boston."

"Okay, let's go."

They merged back onto the highway. "I don't understand why there's so little northbound traffic," the woman muttered.

"Leviathan," Skitter said, fighting to stay away. "Mage and I killed it, but it still did so much damage. I've read that the whole region around an Endbringer attack becomes economically depressed. People are fleeing New Hampshire."

The woman drove on for a few minutes. "I…what was it like?"

"Terrifying," Skitter muttered. "Huge. Impossible. We had armbands that announced the fallen—a cape was dying almost every minute of the fight. Then Mage had the plan, and Legend approved it. Eidolon helped us—he was right there shielding the building we were on. But…but the building fell. Next thing I know I wake up in a room across from my friend Canary. They had a shock-collar on her and they tortured her until she…"

Taylor stopped as the full import of what happened struck. "Holy shit, the Protectorate used me to assassinate Legend. Prism paralyzed him—I saw it. I saw her do something that froze him so he couldn't wipe out my bugs. She fucking _helped me_ into the building. They fucking airlifted me to New York from Brockton Bay. I just…" She had to stop.

Unlike Coil's false accusations of murder, she really did kill him. She was compelled, but it was almost impossible to prove being Mastered like that. Especially not when the ones who mastered her were the supposed Good Guys. Worse yet, in her desperation to escape she killed at least four people. Two were complicit in the conspiracy, but two were just innocent Paramedics.

She had no future. There was no hope any more. The sheer weight of her eye lids added to the despair and started to pull her eyes closed again just as her involuntary chauffeur pulled off the highway and into a parking lot.

Taylor sat staring at the sign for the longest time, wishing more than anything else that her father were there to hold her hand. Hell, she'd even take Mage and his bad sex jokes.

"Go home," she whispered to her driver. "Take care of your baby. Raise her to be strong—because the world's just going to keep getting worse until we all die."

She opened the door and stumbled out. Her bugs followed her, every last one. Not surprisingly, the SUV skidded out of the parking lot before Taylor even managed to reach the door. All around, she gathered more insects—subtly just wasn't going to work anymore. So she went for shock and awe.

With her insects gathered, she stepped into the lobby. The receptionist had already seen her gathering her swarm and was on the phone. The four people waiting in the room screamed as the swarm shot into through the doors Taylor opened.

The insects themselves augmented her voice. "Everyone, phones down _now_."

Even as she spoke, she sent bugs through the whole clinic, tagging those within it. She formed insect drones in front of the back and side entrances, stopping the few nurses and two patients within from trying to escape.

"Lock the building down," Taylor ordered the receptionist. "I have insects on you right now, I'll sense everything you do. Everyone else into the back. Do as I say, no one gets hurt."

Because her insects augmented her voice, everyone in the clinic heard it. She stood waiting while the weeping receptionist locked the front door, making sure to keep a swarm near her, while the others retreated quickly into an open administrative area. It was a small clinic with ten patient rooms spaced in a U-shape around the administration area. Glass walls lined the cubes where the nurses and techs worked. Four nurses, just one actual doctor and two patents gathered in the center of the administration area.

The blubbering receptionist joined them moments later.

The only doctor on site was old—pepper-gray hair over a dark, heavily wrinkled face. Japanese, she'd guess. Another refugee?

"What do you want, young lady?" the doctor demanded. Impeccable English, Jersey accent. Not a refugee, then.

"I've been shot," she said. "I need treatment. Then everyone goes free."

"This is a minor emergency clinic," the doctor said. "We're not equipped…"

"I'm not equipped to be merciful," Taylor snapped. "I was just forced by the Protectorate to assassinate Legend. They need me dead. So that leaves me without mercy. Cooperate, no one gets hurt. Fight, and I'll have my swarm eat that fucking receptionist of yours alive."

The doctor stiffened, his dark eyes glinting with outrage, while the blubbering receptionist actually collapsed to the floor in tears.

"In fact, I might do that just to shut her up," Taylor muttered. Unfortunately, everyone heard her which just set the receptionist off even louder.

"Fine," the doctor said. "Nurse, I'll need …"

"No pain meds."

The doctor sighed. "Young lady, the procedure will be extremely…"

"If you knock me out, my bugs attack everyone. I won't be able to control them." Half of that statement was true; half was a lie.

The doctor harrumphedhis displeasure, but didn't argue as he ordered a list of supplies. He motioned Taylor toward a room but again she shook her head. "Here."

"I'm going to have to remove your shirt," he pointed out.

"I don't care!" She forced herself to calm down. "I don't care."

"Fine." He pulled out one of the task chairs from an empty administrative station. "Sit!"

Taylor sat. She kept her pistol in her left hand.

"Take off the vest and shirt."

"I…I can't," she admitted.

The doctor sighed dramatically. "Linda, Christine, if you please?"

Two very young nurses, both trembling, made their way forward and with surprisingly gentle hands removed the tack vest. Taylor couldn't help the tears of pain from how they had to move her shoulder, but the vest was not something they could simply cut away. They did cut away the black shirt under it, revealing her lanky, pale frame and the solid stream of blood that coated her entire right side down to her hips. One of the nurses sucked in a breath.

The doctor, though, leaned forward and squinted. "How old are you, young lady?"

"Doesn't matter. They'll kill me no matter how young I am."

The doctor's face was blank, utterly without any emotion she could detect. He took her shoulder and looked at it intently through the bottom half of his bifocals. "The vest must have caught some of it. The penetration is not deep—I can see the bullet. Hold still." He gripped her shoulder, causing Taylor to suck in a breath. "No sign of broken bones—I'd say you were lucky."

She wanted to argue about just how lucky she was, but saw no point. The nurse, (Linda, Taylor guessed) took a large piece of gaze and soaked it liberally in an orange disinfecting agent, which she rubbed around the wound. Taylor didn't comment on the piercing, deep sting.

"You have several other wounds," the doctor noted. "Bruised ribs, contusions."

"Yeah, well, they never bothered healing me after Mage and I killed Leviathan," Taylor snapped, the rage making the pain slightly more bearable. "They fucking locked me up while we were unconscious and then shipped me to New York and made me fucking assassinate the only decent human being in the entire Protectorate the minute I woke up. So sue me if I'm a little rough on the eyes."

The nurse, Linda, paused a second before continuing. When done, the doctor took a pair of forceps and in a simple, efficient manner removed the bullet. Taylor found herself staring at it in fascination.

The fascination lasted up until cold, burning water splashed into the wound. The doctor stared at her for a long moment as the nurse irrigated the wound. "I expected you to pass out," he admitted.

"I was hit with a pain bomb by a psychotic bomb tinker," Taylor said. "It permanently increased my pain tolerance."

"Desensitization is not the same as tolerance," the doctor said. He didn't sound…quite as angry. "No sign of necrosis. An artery was hit, but the bullet itself helped slow the bleeding, otherwise I have no doubt you'd be dead. You'll need antibiotics and follow-up treatment."

"Give me what you have," she said.

The doctor sighed. "Christine, we have Cephalaxin in the pharmacy cabinet. The 500 mg bottles, please."

Christine, the blonde one, nodded. Linda, meanwhile, finished packing the wound and wrapped Taylor's shoulder. Taylor was intensely aware that she was sitting in the middle of an open room in nothing but a skimpy skin-toned B-cup bra.

She was also aware that they were all terrified of her.

"Are there any spare shirts here?" she asked.

The two nurses exchanged looks as Christine arrived with a bottle of pills. She disappeared after handing the medicine to Linda. Taylor tracked her movements to a lounge at the back of the clinic that had a few lockers. She returned moments later with an old T-shirt that had a picture of Legend on the front.

 _Legend._ Taylor suddenly sobbed when she saw it. Overhead and on the floor, insects started buzzing in agitation.

"Young lady, you need to get a hold of yourself," the doctor said.

"Fuck you," she muttered. "Fuck all of you. Legend is dead. He was the only one who gave a shit. And his own fucking people made me kill him." She ripped the shirt from Christine's hands and pulled it on, ignoring the pain. She stood, only for the whole world to spin around and dump her on the ground. The insects in the air went insane for a moment, causing the receptionist and one of the patients to scream in alarm before Taylor could see straight again.

Naturally, that was when a piercing siren announced the presence of the police. _Well, that explains the blubbering receptionist. Sneaky girl._

"Do you have epipens?" Taylor asked.

The doctor stiffened but nodded.

A second later, they could hear screaming from outside. Taylor didn't even flinch as she lay on the floor, panting slightly.

"Do you know why things like Nilbog and the Slaughterhouse Nine still exist? Why capes exist? We exist because we're so fucking unfair to fight." She glared at the receptionist, who wasn't blubbering any more, at least. "Anyone else you want to call?"

The girl shook her head.

Taylor took her time climbing back to her feet, bracing herself on the edge of the desk. "You, Kristin…"

"Christina."

"Blondie," Taylor finished. "Where's your car?"

"I don't…I…."

Linda, the brunette, cleared her throat. "She carpools with me."

"Fine. Come with me."

"You said you'd release us if we treated you," the doctor said hotly.

"I am. Except her. She's going to drive me."

"You can…just take the car," Linda said.

Taylor snorted. "I just turned sixteen last month in Brockton Fucking Bay, as if I fucking know how to drive. Come on."

The doctor stood, but Taylor moved her drone right in front of him. The mass of insects in a humanoid shake broke even his calm and he stumbled back. Linda looked over her shoulder in worry once before she followed Taylor toward a back door.

"You have a building key?"

"Yes."

Linda's hands shook as she unlocked the back door onto a small square employee parking lot. Taylor saw a Lexus SUV and three small sedans—a Corolla, a Civic and a Focus. Naturally Linda led her to the Ford.

"Are you going to kill me?" Linda asked after she pulled them onto the highway heading North.

"Hope not," Taylor said. "They're going to be looking for us. Where are we?"

"Um, just north of Providence."

Taylor closed her eyes, desperately trying to recall her local geography. "Take me to Plymouth. Then you're free to go."

Linda frowned. "Plymouth?"

"If I tell you any more, the Protectorate will kill you to find me. Plymouth. No questions."

Linda nodded and started to back up when a dark-gray missile struck the hood of the Focus so hard it severed the entire engine compartment from the rest of the car and sent both spinning. Linda screamed in terror but Taylor just closed her eyes as she realized it was over.

Alexandria stood in the wreckage of the car's engine, her face hidden behind her dark gray helmet. Even though she knew it was useless, Taylor summoned all her bugs from the entire area, both from within the clinic and the surrounding woods. Black swarms descended on Alexandria. Rather than stand there and take it like the brute she was, she shot into the sky like a missile.

Seconds later she flew in from the side. Taylor had a heartbeat where she felt some of her insects pulverized before Alexandria struck the back of the Focus, sheering it off and sending the cabin spinning once more. Linda managed to open the door and spill out into the parking lot. She ran toward the clinic in terrified silence.

Alexandria wasn't just the strongest flying cape—she was reputed to be the most intelligent person on the planet because of her Thinker power. Of course she wouldn't let Taylor get her bugs anywhere near her mouth or face, especially not after Legend.

At best they were going to kill her. At worst, send her to the Birdcage. It fell on her like Leviathan itself that she had well and truly lost. From that first aborted attempt to be a hero, she'd never had a chance because the world itself didn't want heroes. It didn't want people to make things better. Anyone who had a chance to improve the world got a visit from an Endbringer, or worse, people like Alexandria.

All she had left was pain.

"I'm sorry, Dad," she whispered with a short sob as she brought the gun to her temple.

Only to have the weapon snapped away.

"Not so easy as that, I'm afraid," the cold voice of Alexandria said. "No, nothing so quick and easy as that for you, young lady."

"Tell that to Legend, you murdering, hypocritical bitch," Taylor said. She didn't scream—she didn't have the energy. Or so she thought.

A smooth gray glove ripped the door off the shattered Ford and grabbed her forearm. The hand squeezed and Taylor could only stare in horrified, agonized fascination as her forearm snapped like a twig. Only after the pain hit did she scream.

"Anything else you'd like to add?"

She sucked in a breath and controlled the sobs. What was the point? "My neck's right here, you murdering whore."

A fist snapped her thigh bone with almost casual ease. This time there was no sucking in her scream. She bent over her broken leg, howling from the pain Alexandria so easily inflicted. She didn't even have time to bask in that suffering. The same hand that broke her arm and thigh grabbed her by the tactical vest she'd put back on and lifted her out of the car. Taylor closed her eyes, praying for it to end. What she got instead was a calm, mature voice that momentarily broke through the haze of her pain.

"Miss Alexandria, I recognize you are perhaps perturbed," the old Asian doctor said as he stepped from the clinic. Linda hovered right behind him. "However, I will remind you that the villain you are apprehending is a sixteen-year-old child. That she is recovering from a gunshot wound, and what you are doing is very clearly excessive force bordering on outright torture, even under parahuman protocols. She cannot fight you; she cannot harm you. Whatever her ultimate sentence may be, by your own decision to form the Protectorate you are neither her judge nor her jury."

Alexandria didn't bother lowering Taylor to the ground, but she did meet the old man's gaze.

"You are correct," she said. Her voice sounded utterly calm. "Legend was a good friend, and unfortunately I lost my temper. I'll make sure she receives proper care before she is shipped to the Birdcage. Have the owner of this vehicle contact the nearest Protectorate Office for compensation. Good day."

Taylor couldn't even scream. Alexandria took off so fast all breath was pushed out of her lungs. The pain of her broken limbs, the loss of blood from her gunshot wound and the utter weight of despair all conspired to rob her of her consciousness.

~~Simurgh's~~

~~Simurgh's~~

"Danny, you'd better come see this. You'd better come now."

Danny Hebert straightened with a grimace and popped his back. He'd been loading the next day's supply of food from the second level storage racks to the communal kitchen in Coven's apartment complex.

The floor of Coven's lair was lined in simple cots. The level below was the same, and every cot was full, with many people sleeping on the floor as well. Most had lost not just their homes, but everything they had within those homes. The Red Cross and National Guard had both come with supplies to help stretch out what the supposed villains had gathered, but that didn't change the fact that people had no home to return to.

Kurt was one of them. He stood in a pair of jeans that hadn't been washed in so long they'd probably keep walking when he took them off, and a shirt that didn't just have sweat stains, but rings of salt around the sweat stains.

"What's up?"

"Whole caravan of police and PRT agents just showed up, and a nice-dressed couple demanding to see that girl Coven took in—you know, that kid-cape named Dinah?"

Danny nodded but only as a means of hiding the fear. It was day three since Leviathan. Without internet, cable, broadcast TV or even cell phones, he'd not heard anything about Taylor or Harry. Worse yet, Paige had disappeared almost right after the attack.

Kurt led him to the main entrance of the lair, where they had to push through a thick line of co-workers and others to reach the front.

Danny saw more than just police cars and PRT vans. He saw four yellow school busses and four military vehicles. National guardsmen with their weapons ready stood behind lines of PRT agents and police. Almost a hundred armed people, all told.

At their front was the unmistakable form of Armsmaster. Beside him stood a couple only a few years younger than Danny himself. Unlike he and Kurt, the couple was dressed in clean, pressed clothes. A blue pantsuit cinched by a white leather belt for the woman, and tailored slacks, button up and sports jacket for the man.

"Danny Hebert?" Armsmaster said. "This is Kenneth and Louise Alcott. We understand you are holding their daughter here against her will?"

Danny frowned before looking down to make sure he was on the right side of what Harry had called the 'ward line'. "Holding her? Not at all. She arrived with Vista before the Endbringer attack—she warned us the attack was coming and gave us the time we needed to evacuate. No one is holding her against her will."

"Then bring her out to us right now!" Kenneth Alcott spoke like a man accustomed to getting what he wanted. Of course, he was the Mayor's brother and a tech baron himself, and so likely did get what he wanted more often than not.

Regardless of how Danny felt about the man, as a father he couldn't in good conscience keep a child from her parents.

"Lacy, could you…?" He started to ask his friend to go get her when the crowds parted behind them and the last two capes of Coven that Danny could think of appeared.

Genesis had taken the form of a giant, four-armed woman—a figure right out of a bad fantasy movie, with a long top-not of black hair. She stood half again as tall as Danny.

Holding onto the lower of her left hands, Dinah Alcott walked beside her. The little girl's face was etched with tears and a genuine fright Danny recognized as being the same as Taylor's after her mom died.

"Dinah!" Kenneth Alcott rushed forward to his daughter only to hit the ward line and bounce back onto his rear. The line of soldiers behind them reacted instantly, whipping their guns up. This in turn caused the civilians around Danny to scream in alarm and back up.

"HOLD!" Armsmaster's powerful voice boomed across the white street. For a moment, the only sound was the waves crashing against the crumbled pavement where the warehouse wardline ended.

"Deactivate the shield," Armsmaster said. He spoke to Genesis.

She folded the top most of her two arms across a wide, copious chest and smirked. "Can't. Mage said it was an intent-driven magical ward. Anyone who means any of us harm, or who we _think_ means us harm, can't enter without permission."

If not for how serious the situation was, Danny would laugh at how ludicrous it was to have a perfectly normal young woman's voice emerge from such a monstrosity.

"I'm her father!" Kenneth roared.

"Ninety-eight percent chance I'm kidnapped by Coil if I go with you," Dinah said. Though she spoke softly, somehow her voice still carried. "Eighty-five percent chance you and mother die. Mage is the only one who can protect me."

Armsmaster stiffened, evidently understanding what that meant more than the Alcotts.

"You believe Coil is still after you?"

Dinah nodded.

"Nonsense," Kenneth said, not shouting but speaking very loudly. "He's fled the city, probably the country."

"He's in Boston," Genesis said. "Working with Accord. He'll be back."

"How do you know that?" Armsmaster demanded.

Genesis shrugged, which was an interesting effect with four huge arms. "You could ask Tattletale, if you fucks hadn't betrayed them. Where are they? Where's Mage, or Skitter? Where's Tattletale? Why the fuck did you violate the truce?"

"Mage was detained for the negligent homicide of over three thousand people in the 1st Street Shelter. Skitter, on the other hand, murdered Legend this morning…"

The entire crowd started shouting, booing loudly. Danny could only stand and stare in shock as his stomach dropped.

"…ALONG WITH TWO PRT AGENTS, TWO PARAMEDICS AND AN ENTIRE CLINIC OF CIVILIANS AND MEDICAL PERSONNEL," Armsmaster bellowed, his voice somehow supplemented by speakers in his armor. "She was recaptured by Alexandria personally just minutes ago. Her original sentence was reinstated based on her most recent atrocity and she has been sent to the Birdcage, along with Mage and Canary. Coven has ceased to exist. We are here with a court order to evacuate all citizens from this site. Food and shelter will be provided at a new camp on the edge of town. Anyone who stays will be cut off from all emergency supplies."

"One hundred percent chance Mage escapes," Dinah said. Danny turned to look at her and felt a spike of alarm when he saw a drop of blood run down from her nose. "One hundred percent chance you've already lost to Coven. They're going to come back. The Protectorate will be their enemy. Mage is the Endbringer killer. He is God's avatar on this earth. You have no idea what you've done."

Her eyes rolled up into her head and she collapsed into Genesis' arms.

Louise Alcott was holding her hands to her face and weeping, but Kenneth merely glared.

Armsmaster was frowning mightily. "Regardless, my orders stand. Will you cooperate, or will I have to employ harsher methods?"

"The protections on this building survived Leviathan," Genesis said. "Mage said they could survive a nuke. We have supplies. I'm not going anywhere." She turned and looked down across the civilians. "However, as the only remaining member of Coven, I recommend the rest of you go. Our contract was to shelter you and protect you from the attack. We've fulfilled the terms of our contract. There's no point in you being held under siege for something that's not your fault."

There was a lot of angry muttering until Bill Perkins stepped beyond the ward line. One of the PRT agents reached for him, but the old man slapped the hand away.

"Son, you don't want to manhandle me." He turned to the crowd. "Anyone with Magnate, let's go. We'll do a helluva lot more good for these folks out here. Senator Stillwater remembers who got him in office. And this young jackass might by the mayor's brother, but I was the head of his last re-election committee. We all know that in politics, money is thicker than blood. Come on, people."

Kenneth Alcott glared but managed to hold his tongue.

The crowds began to break—people went back in for what few personal belongings they had, but then left in lines being escorted to the school bus. The railroad people went next. The whole time, Armsmaster stood next the Alcotts, the three of them staring intently at Genesis and the girl she held so gently in her lower arms.

Phil Lendy stepped forward.

"Dockworkers, we've come to know a load of bullshit when we see it. If you have kids or family outside of town, then you should head out. For myself, I have a brother in California who's an even bigger asshole than these people, and that's it. So I'm staying with Danny. We all know Taylor Hebert, and we know there's no what in hell she'd assassinate anyone, not of her own volition. These liars have set her up before, and it's obvious they've set her up again."

Danny fought back tears when he saw just how many of the Dockworker's cheered. He met Phil's eyes and merely nodded, unable to express just what he was feeling.

Several of them went, of course. Those with children, or with elderly parents in need of care. In the end, only a hundred or so stayed, most of whom Danny knew by name.

"You're making a mistake," Armsmaster said.

Danny shrugged and wiped away a tear. "The only mistake I see were you bastards shipping my little girl into a prison for monsters. I'm not going anywhere, not while I have breath to breathe."

Armsmaster dismissed him with a snort and looked back at Genesis. "Regardless of the circumstances, the Alcott's are that girl's parents. If you fail to turn her over, you'll be guilty of kidnapping and…"

"Here, take her," Genesis said, cutting the man off.

Kenneth started forward, but Genesis stepped back. "Not the asshat. The mother."

Louise rushed forward and accepted her daughter with a loud, dramatic sob. Genesis rolled her eyes.

"Just to be clear, I'm giving her back because she said you'd probably die when Coil kidnaps her again. Some people are just too fucking stupid to live, and when you're so fucking arrogant to dismiss predictions from the most accurate precog alive, well…you deserve what's going to happen to you."

With that she turned and walked away. As the Alcotts turned back toward a waiting PRT van, Danny had a brief, odd glimpse of a figure in black wearing a devil mask. She waved at him before…before…what was he thinking about?

"Mr. Hebert, your actions could be construed as attempting to aid and abet a known fugitive," Armsmaster said. "This is your last chance to do the right…"

Danny turned his back on the arrogant son of a bitch and walked back into the warehouse. Phil joined him, patting him on the back. The rest of the dockworkers joined him.

* * *

A/N: Next chapter, we see how Harry and Lung are getting along.


	38. Desperation 4

A/N: Last chapter review responses are in my forums like normal. Parts of this chapter were actually inspired by the bits and pieces of _Orange is the New Black_ that my wife made me watch. Imagine a woman's prison with no guards, no hope of escape or release, filled with the worst of the worse. And then imagine (as in canon) that there is a breech between the men's and woman's sections.

* * *

 **Desperation 5.4**

Harry had always felt life was full of important lessons. When he was eight, for instance, he learned that monsters were real when the Simurgh destroyed his childhood.

When he was twelve and Marko Slavitz kidnapped him, he learned that God hated him and wanted him to suffer.

Two months before his seventeenth birthday, he found out God was actually a hot blonde who looked oddly like Olivia D'Abo, including the beauty mark, and that she didn't so much as hate him as she did the universe she reincarnated him into. Maybe. He wasn't sure about that last part, since it could very well have just been a delirious dream.

And thirty seconds ago, he learned that the killing curse did not appear to work on capes. Nor did the entrails-expelling curse, the blood-freezing curse, or any other dark magic designed to either attack the soul or internal organs of an enemy.

This wasn't to say his curses had no effect on Lung—every curse caused the monster to roar louder and grow taller. The monster was now approaching forty feet and was attacking with not just foot and hand, but wing and tail. As large as the open area within prison was, Lung was increasingly taking up enough of it to leave Harry little chance to dodge.

Harry was fortunate apparition was still possible within the Birdcage, though he could feel splinch-inducing resistance whenever he tried to force his way out. Whatever Tinker bullshit Dragon used to build the prison, it served as an effective anti-apparition measure. He tried to remind himself to try a portkey later, but had no doubt that would fail too.

Harry truly began to wonder if his powers were subject to the Manton Limit just like everyone else's were. He'd always assumed they weren't, but in trying to remember what he had to base that belief on, he realized he'd never used any type of soul magic or truly dark curses on the capes he'd encountered. He'd never even tried transfiguring capes in particular. Potions, yes. When they fought the Wards, he transfigured a truck or other items, and the cheering charm wasn't a curse.

It came as a shock that in some ways his magic was limited. Almost as much of a shock as Lung's fiery tail striking him like a giant cricket bat so hard he flew toward the interior tube wall. The wall gave a little, almost like striking water at terminal velocity, before he bounced out a little and fell to the floor.

His limbs were aching from all the abuse, but still intact because of his runes. He looked up to see the towering dragon rushing toward him.

"Fine. You want to act like a fucking dragon, I'm going to treat you like a fucking dragon."

He raised hands and cast a draconian warding spell. He immediately crouched down, ready for Lung to break through since none of his other magic seemed to work. However, the moment the raging cape hit the free-conjured ward wall, Lung bounced back so hard he stumbled.

"Huh, what do you know?" Harry grinned. "Walk like a dragon, talk like a dragon, get warded like a dragon!"

Lung rushed forward again; Harry apparated to the scorched floor behind him and cast another ward wall, then a third and fourth, while Lung spun around to try and find a means of escape. Once he was caught within four ward walls designed to contain even the mightiest Caldosian long-snout, Harry walked casually up to the raging Lung and simply stood there, watching.

It amazed him how quickly Lung's transformation could reverse itself. In seconds, the dragon began to shrink down, the flames extinguishing and the wings drawing back into his body, until less than a minute later Harry stood facing a stark-naked Lung.

It didn't make him feel inadequate as a male at all, no it didn't!

"You have power, little man," Lung announced. "Your bug girl does not. No bugs here, and the television said she was coming. When she arrives, I will teach her not to insult me. I will rip her apart. Then you both will learn your lesson."

Harry's heart beat fast at the thought of Taylor fighting Lung. He knew with dread certainty that Lung was telling the truth. That this monster wouldn't just kill Taylor to make a point, he'd make her suffer in the process. After all, he knew it was only a matter of time before she arrived here too.

Abruptly, his thoughts _clicked_ into a level of efficiency approaching that of a mid-level Thinker. He ran through the various possibilities his choices could result in to protect someone who, if he was honest with himself, meant more to him than he himself did, until he whittled his options down to just one choice.

"I've already learned my lesson, Lung," Harry said sadly. "You taught me too well."

Curses wouldn't work, but the ward did. Which mean physical magic worked just fine. With a wave of his hand, Harry conjured a metallic spike from the floor. It shot up into Lung's body between his legs, through his body cavity, and out the top of his skull so quickly the villain never even had a chance to blink. His mouth gaped and blood began to seep from his lips. It pooled down his legs onto the floor.

Lung was a powerful regenerator, but Harry knew it took him time to reach an impervious state. Destroy his brain, and… And he still might regenerate, actually.

Harry tried the vanishing charm again, having tried it unsuccessfully moments before. This time, perhaps because Lung was well and truly dead, it worked. Lung's body simply vanished. Harry let the dragon wards drop, the spike fade, and then slowly looked around at the hundreds of prisoners who watched the entire exchange in silence.

"Anyone else?" he called out. He unconsciously used magic to augment his voice so that it boomed across the empty room.

"I believe your point was well made, Mage," a cultured, vaguely British voice announced. Harry turned toward the sound as an older man with long, curly black hair and a Romanesque nose walked toward him flanked by a pair of cronies. "Welcome to the Birdcage. I am Marquis."

Harry stared at the man for a long moment before forcing a grin. He felt his mind shift as he assumed the role of a seasoned killer rather than a teenager walking away from the first cold-blooded execution he'd ever done. On a certain level, it disgusted him how easy it was.

"Yeah, I can see the resemblance."

"Resemblance?"

"To your daughter, Amy. You know, Panacea?"

Marquis raised a single brow but rocked forward on the balls of his feet. "Truly? Do you by chance know Amelia?"

"Oh, yeah," Harry said. "I'd tell you we were friends, but she didn't appreciate my sending her naked adopted mom to the lobby of the PRT. In my defense, I was hoping it'd be Glory Girl, but for a woman her age Brandish is pretty damned hot."

Marquis stared for a long moment before laughing loudly. "Oh, that is priceless! Come, young Mage. You'll be welcome in my block. I offer tea, hospitality, and safety in return for that marvelous story!"

As much as it bothered Harry in the back of his mind that he just executed a man, what frightened him more was just how little any of the men around him seemed to care. He realized with a cold knot in his chest that his reaction after killing Lung was as much a test as the fight was. He made a show of summoning his box of things and shrugged.

"Sure, lead the way."

~~Simurgh's Son~~

~~Simurgh's Son~~

"I wish things had gone better with you, Taylor Hebert." Dragon's voice sounded distant and metallic from the angle where the mechanical arm lowered Taylor's containment pod toward the never-ending floor. "Good luck."

Taylor didn't bother speaking. She hurt too badly. The "treatment" Alexandria provided was a brief stop at a clinic where her leg and arm were set and wrapped up in casts, and where her gunshot wound was stitched up and she got a shot of antibiotics. Not even ten minutes after the shot, she was in a single containment pod with her stomach in her throat as Alexandria flew her personally over the entire width of the continent to the Birdcage.

By now she should have been accustomed to the feeling of dropping suddenly, but even so her stomach still felt like was trying to displace her heart as the pod dropped down into the endless floor.

Time lost meaning. She began to appreciate Dragon's warning about not tampering with the containment pod. Just counting heartbeats she was sure she'd been in transit for at least ten minutes before, finally, she saw a flash of yellow. A second followed quickly, and then a third, before the pod slowed.

The effort to remain upright on her one good leg made her grunt, but finally the pod came to a stop and opened. She found herself facing a spacious room in the shape of a triangle. She limped painfully out on her cast, turning just as a cardboard box emerged from the top of her containment pod. The box hit the floor with a heavy thud which obscured the hiss of the door sliding shut. The ceiling was fifteen feet high at least, giving the room a spacious feeling that on second viewing concealed the fact that it was not nearly as large as she thought at first.

Standing hurt too much. She reached a wall and slid down to the floor. Both felt smooth to the touch, but also gave a little. It felt almost as if a solid shove would have broken through… _to release compressed containment foam._ Dragon didn't need to make the walls impenetrable.

"You the new girl, huh? Looks like you got fucked up big time."

Taylor forced herself to focus through the heavy lassitude of despair and pain on the woman approaching her from the door of the hemispherical room. If it was a woman.

The figure looked grotesque at first glance—easily seven feet tall with mottled oil-black and shockingly pink skin in a pattern resembling a giraffe. Her head looked like a large bell, giving her mouth an exaggerated width while making her eyes and the top of her head small in comparison. Taylor could only tell for sure what her gender was by the massive gallon-sized breasts that threatened to tear free of the orange jumpsuit she wore. Arms larger around than both Taylor's legs combined flexed a mass of muscle most men would have been terrified by, while her legs looked like something she'd expect to see on an elephant.

"Here, let me take a look at you."

To Taylor's shock, the brutish woman stomped over, grabbed the front of her jumpsuit, and easily lifted her off the ground.

"Skinny bitch, ain't ya?" she said.

"Put me down," Taylor said, forcing herself to keep her voice calm.

"Bitch, you do not want to talk back to me," the figure said. "You got assigned to my block, and you too fucked up to work, so your pussy is all I care 'bout. Ain't got no tits to speak of neither. Shit, bitch, you sure you're even a girl?"

Taylor struggled as the woman gripped the elastic band of her prison-issue orange pants and pulled it down to expose her privates.

"No dick, so good enough," the figure said. "Broken legs don't matter to the fucks at the breech. You just lay there and take it, and you'll get food. You make an issue, I give your ass to Acidbath. He likes them lily-assed white girls."

Taylor couldn't speak. She couldn't even begin to form words to express her horror at what was happening to her. She desperately reached for insects, but there were none at all. She was utterly powerless.

The monstrous figure continued to hold Taylor up in one arm like a doll while with the other she reached down to grab the box.

"I'll give you a test run myself," the woman said as she carried Taylor out of the smaller room into an open atrium lined with four levels of balconies that each cured around the exposed hemispherical space.

Dozens of women watched along the balconies, some jeering or catcalling. It felt as if she were in a nightmarish version of Winslow.

"She's no good for the breech, Shotput!" one woman shouted from the second level. "Bitch ain't got no tits!"

"She got pussy, that's all those fucks care 'bout," the huge woman—named Shotput—shouted back. "I'll let you know how it tastes!"

That generated more catcalls and whistles.

Taylor tried to struggle, but with a broken arm, a broken leg, a gunshot wound in her shoulder and no bugs, there was little she could do against the brute that held her like a child's doll.

Abruptly she felt a drain, as if she were on the verge of sleep and felt her consciousness and her energy sink down in one dizzying swoop. Shotput stopped mid-step and swayed before dropping Taylor, who cried out as she tried to catch herself on one good leg and one good arm.

A shape formed before the two—a shape of scintillating, glittering light.

"She's mine, Shotput," the figure said. "We can make an issue of it, or you can walk away with the girl's smokes as compensation."

Taylor tried crawling away, confused and terrified over what was happening.

"Fuck you, Lustrum!" Shotput shouted. "Girl was assigned my block. You know that shit Acidbath fucked Schism up so bad she ain't no good at the breech any more. I need new pussy. This girl ain't no use to anyone but for a fuck."

"The girl is the daughter of one of mine," the shimmering light body that must have belonged to Lustrum said. It took a step forward. "Non-negotiable. Walk away, or Block S is going to need a new leader."

Shotput almost trembled with a rage so intense Taylor could see it like heat making the air shimmer. Only…the air really was shimmering. Shotput was getting even bigger!

"No, not this time you fucking old bitch. I'm tired of you acting like you're better than us. This ain't your fucking prison, and this bitch ain't your fucking pussy, she's mine. I'm going to…"

The light intensified. The shimmering around Shotput turned into an easily visible wavering that abruptly shot away toward Lustrum's hard-light construct. At first Taylor thought it was some type of ranged attack from Shotput, but after a second, when Shotput dropped to her knees, she remembered what she'd read in the autobiography of Lustrum in her mom's old bookshelf.

Lustrum drained the energy of those around her and used it to create a hard-light body. Shotput, being so powerful herself, had lots of energy to fuel the featureless hard-light body. It rushed forward in a blur, raising its right arm back. The second the arm swung toward Shotput, however, it changed shape, morphing into a long, diamond-like spike.

Shotput screamed a second before the sharp tip of the pike slammed into her eye and at a vertical slant down through the center of her head, to pierce out the back of her neck.

The huge brute fell over gushing blood. The hard-light projection looked back at the watching women—there were no more catcalls or jeers.

"Cocija, you were Shotput's second. Will Block S have a problem with Block E?"

A young Hispanic woman with a long face and a tattoo of lightning across one cheek shook her head. "Shotput was a bitch. But she was our bitch."

Lustrum nodded. "Compensation, then. A month's free care for yours and Lesion's kids?"

Taylor watched as the villain Cocija considered the offer before nodding. "Add the new girl's smokes we'll call it done."

The hard-light body walked toward the box that came with Taylor, opened it and removed a carton of cigarettes, which she easily threw up to the second level balcony. Cocija caught it one handed, nodded, and then walked away.

Lustrum turned toward Taylor, who couldn't tell what the woman was thinking because the projection had no face to carry an expression. She picked up the box before stepping to Taylor.

"Don't say anything."

The light body grew as large as Shotput and lifted Taylor in the unoccupied arm like she was a baby. She carried Taylor toward the nearest set of stairs. It was a long climb, each step jostling Taylor's limbs and shoulder, until finally they reached the top level. Each level was composed of three cell blocks separated from the rest by a single large barred gate. A pair of fierce-looking female capes stood guard at each side of E-Block's gate. Both nodded to Lustrum, but only one spoke. She was tall, skinny with scars across her head and a row of sharp teeth.

"That's the girl killed Legend? Don't look like much."

"Looks can be deceiving, Barracuda. Hell, look at me."

Barracuda's laugh sounded cold. "Right on, Boss."

Within the block Taylor could hear more women, televisions blaring away, and even the occasional sound of children.

 _Children in the Birdcage._

Finally, they reached their destination.

"Taylor, oh God, are you okay?"

She spun in Lustrum's arm and saw Paige in her orange jump suit standing up amidst a ring of four kids, while an older, matronly figure with a long graying braid and a wide waist sat slumped on a sofa set against the far wall. Taylor could see a ring of bruising around Paige's neck.

"Alexandria took issue with my killing Legend," Taylor noted. She felt ashamed at the moisture in her eyes and the thickness of her voice.

Paige rushed to her side and took her gently, supporting her enough that Taylor could hop-one legged to another sofa. Behind them, the light body faded away just as the older woman woke with a low moan.

"Kids, go on home today, please," Canary said to the four kids. All were between two and four and stood with wide eyes before scuttling out.

"Children?" Taylor whispered. "What kind of hell forces people to raise children in prison?"

"A prison with no exits, no guards, and no mercy but what we make ourselves." Lustrum's real voice sounded exceedingly tired and old. Taylor looked over at the thick-bodied woman with the braid and realized that this was the real supervillain Lustrum, who was put in the birdcage four years before Taylor was born for ordering her followers to emasculate every man they could. It took only two before the entire Triumvirate descended and tore her organization down to its foundation.

"You saved me," Taylor said.

"I'd like to say it was because of fond memories of Annette, but your mom abandoned me to marry a man," Lustrum said. She heaved herself with some effort from the sofa. "But Shotput was putting moves on the other block leaders. Block E controls the breech on the women's side, that gives us power over all trade between the men's and women's blocks. She wanted that. Hopefully this will buy me another year or two before the next challenger steps up."

"So, politics," Taylor summed up.

"The way of the world, even in this insane place," Lustrum agreed.

"Still, I…thank you. There aren't any bugs here; I might as well be powerless."

"You had power enough to kill Legend," Lustrum pointed out.

Taylor, though, shook her head. "No, it wasn't me. I mean, it wasn't just me, they set it up so that he never had a chance to defend himself."

"Explain it, then," Lustrum demanded.

Holding Canary's hand, Taylor did just that.

~~Simurgh's Son~~

~~Simurgh's Son~~

A soft blue light woke Taylor's disturbed, pain-ridden sleep. Her eyes shot open with a rush of adrenaline, expecting to find a threat. Instead, she felt Paige's arm around her chest, comforting her in the cell they shared for mutual protection.

What woke her was a butterfly, but not one she could feel. For one, it was the size of her head, for another it flickered and glowed with an ethereal blue light. It radiated an odd warmth—less like a fire, and more like the odd feeling she got in her stomach when Harry kissed her right before they killed Leviathan.

To her shock, the butterfly spoke in Harry's voice. " _Saw the news this morning that you'd arrived. I'm here too. I'm coming for you, and I won't stop until Coven is together again. It's not over yet, Taylor. Together, we can do anything. Look for me."_

The butterfly vanished in a puff of warm air, like his breath washing over her neck. Beside her, Paige stirred but did not wake up. Taylor stayed where she was, staring up at the ceiling for the rest of the night and wishing it was Harry's arm over her chest.

* * *

A/N: This is the last of Taylor's personal desperation arc. And yes, just as Harry Potter's Patronus was influenced by his father, and Snape's was influenced by Lily, Harry Bailey's patronus was dictated by his feelings for Taylor.


	39. Desperation 5

A/N: As much as everyone absolutely loves ;) my review responses, I had a choice this morning of either doing review responses, or getting a new chapter posted. It's the Saturday before school starts and it is too crazy, so I barely even had time to do this. Hopefully things will slow down next week and I can get more done.

* * *

 **Desperation 5.5**

There wasn't need for the rumor mill to tell Harry that Taylor was in the Birdcage with him. He saw it on the national morning news in the common lounge Marquis maintained for those in his block. It wasn't altruism on Marquis' part—it was yet another form of control. Only those in favor got to watch.

Harry very quietly transfigured his tasteless ration bar into a Snickers and watched as the morning newscasters played Legend's last seconds over and over again, interrupted by pictures of a bruised and broken Taylor Hebert being flown into custody by Alexandria herself.

" _New reports have just confirmed that in addition to the hero Legend, two PRT agents and a pair of paramedics, Taylor Hebert, also known as the villain Skitter, murdered an entire emergency care clinic south of Boston. Among her victims, retired Army captain Dr. Howard Shin. Three nurses, two patients and two more administrative staff were also killed in the attack before Alexandria was able to track her down and capture her_."

The anchorwoman who spoke was Japanese, though her English was flawless. She was petite and beautiful with long black hair and a habit of leaning forward to emote just how horrific and terrible Skitter's crimes were.

Beside her, the large Hispanic man nodded energetically. "While Alexandria declined our interview request, Director Rebecca Costa-Brown of the United States Protectorate had this to say…"

The screen switched to the same woman Harry met in New York. Beside Harry, sipping on tea, sat Marquis. "Your friend has made quite the impression," the villain said.

Harry shrugged. "See that woman there? That's Alexandria."

Marquis spit out his tea. Around the room, several other villains stopped what they were doing and stared.

Marquis sat up, his face expressionless. "What did you say?"

"When Coil brought me over from the UK, he had to get permission from the Protectorate because I was supposedly Simurgh-influenced. I met Costa-Brown. Remember I said I could sense capes? Sense their powers? Her power is strength and thought, on a scale I'd never felt from anyone else save for Legend herself. That's Alexandria. The entire thing—civilian oversight of the Protector—is a load of bollocks. There are no heroes, no villains. It's just a fucking scam."

Marquis stared at the screen where Rebecca Costa-Brown was condemning the entire gang of Coven, but especially Skitter. "You've unmasked a member of the Triumvirate."

Harry shrugged. "Yeah, in the Birdcage. You tell me how far it's going to disseminate. I know for a fact that your own daughter tried to reach you and couldn't. It's not like we have open communications here."

Marquis relaxed faintly. "She tried?" He sounded wistful.

"Yeah. Asked Miss Militia herself. I didn't really unmask Alexandria because there's no one to tell." He stood and looked around the room before meeting Marquis' eyes. "You want to know the really scary part? The Endbringers are alien—weapons sent here to destroy us. Think about that for a sec. The Endbringers are the first wave, what's the second?"

With that, Harry left the lounge and started thinking about how to get to Taylor.

The breach between the male and female populations was not in the open area, but rather deep inside the fourth level, where the D and E blocks shared a wall. This he learned over the course of his first day, since he knew Canary was there and was determined to get to her. The problem was that on the men's side, the D-block was controlled by Acidbath.

Even in a prison filled with the worst villains in the Western Hemisphere, with a few added from elsewhere in the world, Acidbath was an utter, complete asshole. However, he was an asshole who could literally turn into a sentient, mobile wave of the most potent sulfuric acid he'd ever heard of. His control of Block D, and the fact that he himself was the one who first breached the wall, gave him a disgusting level of political power.

From what Harry heard, he traded that political power for girls from the women's side he could mutilate and torture with his acid. In that regard, he reminded Harry a great deal of Markos.

A couple of inquiries also let Harry know that newcomers, even newcomers who killed Lung, did not get access to the women's blocks unless they were one of Acidbath's flunkies. Only established prisoners who had accrued enough cigarettes or food to pay got access to women—they had to pay Acidbath first, then the women bosses as well. They paid in things like food, coffee, tea, cigarettes or even magazines and books. They paid with favors as well.

He spent the day planning and thinking, going through the assigned chores that all prisoners had to do if they wanted clean clothes. All the time, he thought about how to get to Taylor.

That night, he cast his _Patronus_. He stared at it when it formed, confused. For some reason, he was expecting Harry Potter's famous doe. However, what emerged was a giant monarch butterfly. Confused or not, he knew it would work. He gave it his message and sent it to wherever Taylor was.

He prayed to that beautiful god who looked like Olivia D'Abo that Taylor was safe, and that he'd be able to see her soon.

~~Simurgh's Son~~

~~Simurgh's Son~~

Harry rarely slept. Nor did he sleep his second night in Marquis' cell block. Instead, laying on a cot surrounded by some of the worst villains ever, he sorted through the many memories of Harry Potter's lives—of the times when he had to kill to survive; of when he chose to kill for a greater purpose. When it mattered, Harry Potter was a remarkably effective killer.

Harry Bailey wasn't sure he could or even wanted to be like that. But he also knew that his normal approach of fast talking was not going to work in the Birdcage. People here had nothing left to lose. More importantly, from what he understood Acidbath was the worst of the worst, and made a point of attracting those of like minds to his block.

That knowledge helped Harry formulate a plan. He rehearsed the necessary magic in his mind, trying hard not to think of the consequences of his actions. That he was no longer the underdog, a righteous Robin Hood, but an actual killer.

All he cared about was finding Taylor and Canary. Once he was together with his team, he had no doubt they'd figure out a next step. They always did.

When his magic told him it was seven that morning, he stood and dressed in the same orange jumpsuit everyone else had to wear. After brushing his teeth, however, he made a point to shrink the remainder of his personal belongings until they could fit in the breast pocket of his shirt.

He made his way down the hall, past the other prisoners who tended to sleep late before beginning the daily chores necessary to ensure clean clothes and hygienic surroundings, until he reached the lounge near the gate to Marquis' cell block. Not surprisingly, Marquis was there with his lieutenant, Cinderhands.

"Ah, young Bailey, good morning. Tea?"

"No thank you," Harry said as politely as possible. Marquis might have been well-mannered, but Harry had no doubt the man was as much a killer as the rest. "Instead, I wanted to give you a gift as thanks for your hospitality."

"Oh?"

Harry conjured a wine bottle, magically filled it with water, and then transfigured the water into wine. "A Merlot. The wine itself is permanent, but the glass bottle will fade away in about a week."

Marquis stared at the bottle with obvious longing—there was no alcohol in the birdcage. "Your power allows you to create wine?"

"Yup. Consider it a thank you, and a parting gift."

That generated a sharp look. "A parting? And where do you think you'll go?"

Harry pointed up. "I'm going to go take D Block away from Acidbath."

The sharp look changed into a frown. "If it were that easy, we'd have already done it, Mr. Bailey. Acidbath has few friends, but a most effective breaker state."

Harry shrugged. "Well, if it doesn't work at least you'll be able to toast my memory. Thank you again, Marquis."

Without waiting for permission, Harry disapparated from within the lounge to the open atrium. He saw a few of the prisoners exercising, probably more out of boredom than anything else, and then looked up. From his perspective, Cell Block D was to his far left against the wall which bisected the whole prison.

With a thought and a burst of magic, Harry bypassed the stairs and flew straight up the four levels until he reached the gate leading to Cell Block D. As always, the sudden acceleration made his stomach loop and he absolutely loved the sensation.

He had little time to enjoy it, though. Once he cleared the rails on the fourth floor, he was immediately met by a set of twins—men with pock-marked, scarred faces. A third, fourth and fifth of the men—all identical down even to their clothing—appeared in short order, all bearing shanks.

"Who the fuck you think you are?" one of the clones said.

Harry answered with a swarm of Q'onos firewasps—massive flying insects the people of this universe had never seen. Each three-inch long wasp had stingers and a venom powerful enough to kill in seconds. One by one the clones popped away as the venom killed them, until only a single man remained screaming as he tried swatting at the notoriously sturdy carnivorous insects.

Harry grabbed the already dying man and with nothing more than muscle and leverage sent him flying over the rail to fall the four floors below. The man's screams brought others from their various cells, capes and monsters alike.

Harry quietly cast wards all around himself before augmenting his voice. "I'm here to kill Acidbath and take this block."

"The fuck you are." A huge brute appeared clad only in a pair of jumpsuit pants. Behind him, a slim, bruised woman poked her head out before disappearing again.

The brute punched his fist outward, and almost instantly a spike of steel shot at Harry, only to bounce off the simple free kinetic ward he'd placed. Harry's response was teleportation—he apparated to behind the striker, grabbed his arm, and then apparated instantly into the open atrium b the ceiling. He returned to his original point as the brute fell. Harry doubted it would kill the man, but from his angry scream and the loud thud, he wasn't a flier.

Only when his lieutenant was gone did Acidbath appear. The man reminded Harry of the worst of Markos' sleaze: thinning blond hair, pockmarked cheeks and an air of stench and decadence. His clothes were rattled with small burns, likely from his power.

"You're the little shit that killed Lung yesterday, ain'tchya?" Acidbath's voice was high-pitched and verged on hyperactive.

"Yup."

"You think you're gonna kill me now, is that it?"

"Yup."

Harry could hear heavy footsteps on the nearby stairs as the brute rushed back up, evidently unharmed from his drop.

Acidbath made a show of scratching a hairy armpit. "You come into my house spouting off that shit, I'm gonna burn your dick off and shove it down your throat!"

The change was instantaneous—one moment he was a scrawny, unwashed man with hygiene issues, the next he was a living, sentient wave of sulfuric acid that rushed almost like one of Leviathan's water-echoes right at Harry.

The brute arrived behind Harry, a fist cocked back to fire one of his steel spikes. Harry disapparated to a point further up the hall, behind Acidbath, and fired a simple banishing charm at the cape. Still in his breaker state, Acidbath sloshed onto the brute, who screamed as even his resistant skin reddened under the acidic attack that would have killed a normal person.

Harry raised both hands and blasted the brute and Acidbath both with high velocity streams of water which sent them tumbling once more over the rail. This time, though, Harry followed. He disapparated to the floor and arrived seconds before the acid-burned brute landed. Harry conjured his own giant metal spike directly above the man and let gravity drive the point down through the brute's chest.

It also pierced the floor below him—instantly containment foam boiled up around the brute and Acidbath himself. Aware of all the villains watching him, Harry conjured more wards around the billow of foam before casting a simple vacuum charm that evacuated all air from the warded space.

He caught a brief glimpse of the reverted Acidbath staring at Harry with wide, blood-shot eyes as he gasped for air that wasn't there. Harry turned his back to view the other capes.

"I'm claiming D-block," he said. "Anyone who has any questions should talk to Acidbath."

He rose back into the air, cloaked in magic, until he reached his new block. "Anyone who isn't housed here, get out now," he shouted when he arrived.

Four women, wearing only blankets, scurried out. Five men followed in various states of dress. Harry was surprised that only twenty or so capes remained, none of whom looked any better than Acidbath.

"I'm Mage, the Leviathan-killer. This is my block now. You don't like it, get out and find someplace else."

A skinny man with a headful of black hair snorted from the nearest cell. "You're a fucking kid. You think you can keep a block here?"

"Let's find out."

Harry raised both hands, causing all the other residents of the block to tense and assume combat-ready positions. Harry, though, didn't cast anything so mundane as an offensive charm. Instead, he cast the most powerful Muggle-repelling charm he could.

It turned out that even if capes could resist some of his curses, they still lacked magic, and so were affected by Muggle repelling charms. With that, Harry walked down the center of the hall as if he owned it, moving down the length of the cell block's central hall until he reached the larger, curved rooms at the back that served as lounges in Marquis's block, but Acidbath's personal quarters in this one. Harry knew this just from the unconscious, naked, acid-burned woman on the bed.

Behind him, the weaker of the capes grabbed their things and ran as the magically-induced paranoia of the ward began taking its toll. Some of the stronger ones lasted up to half an hour until they too fled.

When they were gone, he placed an age-line across the main gate—only himself or someone over 100 would be able to enter.

The woman in Acidbath's stench-filled room hadn't stirred from where she lay sprawled across his bed despite the repelling charm. Concerned, he cancelled his muggle repelling charm and checked her pulse. Only then did she move, spinning around with astonishing speed with a knife that she rammed right into his temple.

"Ouch," Harry said with a blank expression as the knife blade broke against his runes.

The woman stood, naked as the day she was born. While she wasn't the most endowed woman in the world, she was naked. In his world, that would have been enough to elicit excitement. Except that most of her skin looked angry and red with light acid burns, with some spots actually blackened into holes where Acidbath had concentrated his acid more thoroughly.

He could see from her face that she felt every one of those burns—there were tears in her eyes even as she gritted her teeth and backed away until she touched a wall.

"One more fucking step I crack the wall and we all die. Outer wall—there's vacuum out there."

Harry shrugged. "I can survive vacuum. But don't worry, I just killed Acidbath. Block is clear, it's mine now. Do you need me to heal those burns?"

The woman stared at him, confused. "Wha…what do you mean? No one can kill Acidbath!"

"I did. The block's mine. My name is Mage, I arrived yesterday. What's your name?"

She stared, not even trying to hide herself from him. "It's….Schism. The papers called me Schism."

"Okay, Schism. I can heal. Would you like me to heal those burns?"

"Why?"

"Because it's the right thing to do."

Abruptly she laughed, even while tears ran down her cheeks. "Right thing to do? What are you, some fucking comedian? We're in the fucking Birdcage. There's nothing right about this fucking hell hole!"

"Yeah, I know. I wanna heal you anyway."

"What, for a blowjob? A quick fuck before you kill me?"

Harry shrugged. "I'm kind of in a thing. Girl I really like, she's actually here, I think. Otherwise I'd say hell yes, you're pretty enough. But I'm pretty sure Skitter'd have my ass if I cheated on her before we even really had a chance to…well, date much."

She continued to stare at him, as if her brain couldn't quite process what he was saying. Sure she needed a moment, Harry took stock of his new quarters. It was filled with half-eaten ration bars, clothes, cigarettes, acid-burn marks and things he couldn't even guess at. He summoned all the stinking clothes and rather than burn then, cast laundry charms on them before sending them to a corner.

The trash he vanished, while a quick _Reparo_ restored the walls and floor. He cast another on the clearly battered bed, causing it to fluff back out like new.

The entire time Schism stood with her hand on the wall, naked and obviously suffering from all the acid burns. Slowly, she sank to the floor and wept, not making a sound. Harry grabbed one of the ration bars and conjured it into a bowl of ice cream.

"Here, I read crying girls always need ice cream."

She stared at it but made no move to take it. "Can you make the pain stop?" she whispered.

Harry picked the long streak of angry red burns on her shoulder and cast the burn charm on it, a Mage variant of the same Madam Pomfrey used ages ago after his close encounter with a dragon. It was modified to be wandless, but worked at a touch. The woman turned and stared at the clear, unblemished skin he left behind.

"My civilian name is Harry Bailey," he said softly. "I'll turn seventeen on July 31st. I don't want sex or drugs or a slave. I…" He chuckled. "Okay, yeah, sex is awesome. But I'd like to have sex with my girlfriend, you know? I want to find my friends Skitter and Canary, that's the only reason I took the block. And I'll heal you if you want because it's the right thing to do."

She met his eyes. "Stephanie."

"Stephanie. Why are you in the birdcage?"

"I…killed some kids at my school. After…I triggered when my parents were in a car crash. They were…they were laughing about it. About my parents dying. I didn't mean to, I didn't, but I cracked the bleachers and they died. One was a state senator's son, so…so I got sent here."

Harry winced as he touched one of the deep burns in her breast.

"And then you got sent here, and given to Acidbath." She didn't even notice he was touching her left breast—all she cared about was the burn was gone.

With a grunt he pushed himself to his feet. "Come lay down, this'll be easier if you do."

He held his hand to her, and after a moment's hesitation she took it. She laid back down on the bed and simply stared in silence as Harry proceeded to heal the many burns.

He did his best not to obsess too much about just what he was touching. He wasn't touching a naked woman's body—he was touching acid burns of various levels of severity. Some of the places the sick fuck burned her made his cheeks flare, but it didn't matter. He was there to heal her.

When she turned onto her stomach to reveal tracks of scars, he felt a visceral punch.

"Wow," he whispered. "Hey, wanna see something?"

"What?"

He pulled off his own jumpsuit top and turned so she could see his back.

"Just like mine," she whispered.

"Yeah. Marko Slavitz in Yorkshire. Couldn't enter a breaker state like Acidbath, but he could generate acid. Got that when I was twelve, first time I tried running away." He pulled the top back on and then proceeded to heal the burns all over her body. Once done he looked through the various jumpsuits until he found one much smaller than Acidbath's. He pulled it out and handed it to Stephanie.

She got dressed without seeming to care that he was in the room. "I…thank you."

Harry shrugged. "Hey, how often do I get to touch a beautiful, naked woman I don't know without getting slapped? Win-win."

She stared a moment before a smiling cautiously. "You said your friends were here. I…heard Canary runs a day care in Lustrum's block. Don't know 'bout Skitter. Are you sure she's here?"

"Pretty sure. She was on the news for killing Legend."

Plain brown eyes widened. "Wow, did she?"

"Not really. It was all a set up. Hey, you know where the breach is, right? Can you show me?"

She nodded, this time no longer as cautious, and led him out of Acidbath's room into the abandoned block. In the distance, Harry could see a crowd of angry men at the gates of the cell block, trying with various powers to break through the age line. Stephanie noticed too, but didn't question it as she led the way through another of the larger rooms.

The breach, for all its impact on prison life, was a simple round hole covered in a sheet in an otherwise empty lounge. Harry walked up to the curtain and pulled it back to reveal two very large, scary-looking women standing on either side.

Stephanie joined him and one of the women snorted with contempt. "Schism, why ain't you dead yet?"

Stephanie's embarrassed blush actually reminded Harry a great deal of Taylor. "H…Mage killed Acidbath. He's taken the block, and he healed me."

The other woman, a tall, scaled figure with rows of tiny sharp teeth, shook her head. "Too bad. You pissed off the Crane, she called the banishment and Shotput agreed. Lustrum had no choice. You can't come back."

"What'd you do?" Harry asked his new companion.

"Harmonious Crane wanted my kid," Stephanie said. "I said no."

"Has the baby anyway, don't she?" fish-tooth said.

Harry looked from Stephanie to Fish-face. "Two of my gang-mates are on your side. What do I have to do to get access to them?"

"Depends on what you got?"

Harry shrugged. "Wine by the gallon. Chocolate. Name it, but you only get it when I see Skitter and Canary. Oh, and Stephanie's kid."

"She give you a good fuck?" Fishface said.

Before Harry could answer, Stephanie said, "I offered. He said no."

"Must not have been woman enough after…"

Harry lowered his arm, having cast the bubblehead charm around the cape.

"The girl just got burned to fuck by a psychopath, and you're laughing about it. So I'm done talking to you. That bubble around your head will keep you from breathing until you get Lustrum. Better go before you die of asphyxiation."

Barracuda's eyes bulged, but she did turn and run.

"You…you'll really help me get my kid?"

Harry shrugged. "Kids need their moms, especially in shitpits like this one."

Not two minutes later, Barracuda returned free of the charm with a heavy-set older woman with a single graying braid hanging over her left shoulder. She had wide, heavy features that likely meant she was never beautiful, but she definitely looked like a strong person.

"You threatened my lieutenant," Lustrum said flatly. "Ordinarily I'd kill you for that."

Harry held out a ration bar. "Here, have some dark sea-salt chocolate as compensation. That's how it works here, right? Weregild for insults or favors?"

Heavy brows rose up but she accepted the bar. She took a piece and popped it in her mouth before both brows raised. She handed the bar to Barracuda. The fish-faced cape popped the remaining bar in her mouth and began writhing and making frankly X-rated sounds as she chewed.

Lustrum ignored her. "Barracuda says you killed Acidbath. Why?"

"To be here, now, to get Skitter and Canary."

The flat look continued. "Why?"

"Because they're my teammates. Skitter and I fucking killed Leviathan. I want to be with them."

Lustrum stared intently at Harry, reminding him oddly enough of Marquis. "You love her."

Harry shrugged. "Love's a silly word. We enjoy arguing with each other. More importantly, she's my teammate. She and Canary both."

"Got yourself a regular harem, don't' you?"

"God I wish," Harry laughed. "Back in the lair, I was surrounded by Skitter, Canary, a drop-dead gorgeous Thinker named Tattletale, some other stranger whose name I can't remember but whom I'm sure flashed me once, and Jess who could make bodies like you, only physical instead of light. Beautiful, sexy girls, and I swear I didn't get laid once. The stranger-girl who flashed me only did it because she wanted to fuck with my head, not actually fuck me."

Beside him, Stephanie frowned. "I offered to…"

Harry shrugged, feeling unspeakably old. "You were hurt. You didn't need some horny teenager humping you, you needed healing spells and some peace."

Lustrum crossed her arms over her massive chest. "Regular boy scout, aren't you?"

"Yeah, a boy scout who's murdered four people in the past two days. Just call me Mr. Perfect."

The matronly cape studied first Harry then Stephanie. "It was a raw deal, Schism. You weren't one of my girls, and a fight between me and Crane the Harmonious would help no one—the woman's too damned fast. You'll have to try to buy your boy back. Fortunately he's young enough she won't have been able to traumatize him too much. And the agreement means you can't come back to our side—you're going to have to stay on that side."

Harry shrugged. "Know what? Every member of Coven was fucked over in one way or the other—it's what brought us together. Sounds like Stephanie here's been fucked over lots, so she'll fit right in. Now, I know it's a _quid pro quo_ world. You have people I want, and I can make water into wine and ration bars into pretty much any food you want. Think we can come to an agreement?"


	40. Desperation 6

A/N: Chap 39 review responses are in my forums like normal. Thanks for reading.

* * *

 **Desperation 5.6**

Dinah sat in the back of the family's new black SUV, surrounded by clothes, books and toys she'd never played with even before she was kidnapped. Dad drove while Mother sat sidewalks, attempting helplessly to engage Dinah in conversation. They were on their way to the Alcott family summer home in Martha's Vineyard.

The seat beside her was empty sometimes, and sometimes not. From the corner of her eye, she occasionally caught movement. It should have scared her, but her power assured her the odd sometimes presence wasn't a threat. If anything, it made her feel moderately safer.

Ahead of them, an unmarked but utterly obvious PRT sedan led the way, while behind them an equally obvious black SUV carried even more PRT soldiers, all dedicated to her protection. With each passing minute, the numbers got worse and worse.

She'd told them that morning, but they ignored her. She told them again as they were loading up the car, but Dad just yelled at her, before looking guilty and giving her a hug.

"We have more PRT agents than the President," he assured her. "There's no way anyone is getting to us."

There was zero percent chance they would believe her, no matter what she said. Theirs was a belligerence born of desperation, like Dinah herself when she was little and believed that if she hid her head under the pillow the monster in her closet wouldn't get her. She was only twelve, but she was old enough to know that simply didn't work. Unfortunately, her parents hadn't grown up enough to know that.

That's why when the ground in front of the lead car flashed a brilliant gold, only for the car itself to shoot up into the air almost as if gravity had been reversed, Dinah was not surprised. She closed her dry eyes and gripped her seatbelt, ignoring her mother's scream and her father's alarmed shout as he pulled the wheel hard to try and avoid the golden section of the road.

She heard the explosion and could see the flash of light against the back of her parent's seat, but did not turn to look to see their other escort destroyed. Instead, she stared right at her mother. In that brief instant, her mother's lips set and her shoulders hunched down as she realized that a mere pillow could not keep the monsters at bay.

 _I'm so sorry._ She didn't say the words aloud, simply mouthed them moments before the front of the SUV exploded in a hail of gunfire. Dinah squeezed her eyes shut—not to make the monster go away, but because she didn't want to see.

She heard the door open and something cut her seatbelts. She felt strong hands grip her arms and pull her from her SUV. Then she heard the oily, high-pitched voice of her nightmares.

"Hello, Pet. It's been too long."

~~Simurgh's Son~~

~~Simurgh's Son~~

Aisha forced her eyes to open. The sound of gunfire still made her ears ring like a bell. The door was open beside her and a skinny man with a disgusting bulge in a black body suit decorated with snakes was calling Dinah "pet" while all around them, capes and soldiers began assembling in formation around the car.

Dinah whimpered in fear as Coil reached into the SUV to grab her. For her part, Aisha didn't even hesitate as she whipped out one of her two stolen kitchen-knives and slashed. Coil backed away with a cry of pain where Aisha cut his eye.

"Stranger protocols!" the villain shouted.

Aisha grabbed Dinah's hand to run when a flash of gold light struck her and made her feel oddly heavy. Before she knew it, something hard struck her temple. Her ears rang and she saw odd sparkles before her eyes before rough hands pulled her out of the car.

"Well done, Citrine," the sissy-assed bitch attacking them said. "Accord's praise was well placed. Now, who do we have here?"

Brian always talked about the unwritten rules—not even villains were supposed to unmask other villains. Coil didn't seem to care about that as he removed her demon mask.

"Ah, what a pleasant surprise. Young Aisha Laborn. Your brother worked for me, young lady."

"And how'd that work out for him, you dick-sucking butt-fucker."

The blonde in the odd yellow dress snorted. "How old is this girl?"

"Fourteen, if memory serves," Coil said. He seemed calm considering the mess Aisha made of his left eye. "She is the sister of Grue, formerly under my employ. She's obviously a stranger, and would be a potential threat if not for your own unique trump abilities, my dear. Sad, she might have been useful. As it is now, she's merely a threat. Captain, please shoot her."

"One hundred percent chance your death lasts two weeks if you hurt her." The clear, high-pitched voice echoed from the back of the SUV. Dinah was still in her seat, hemmed in by Coil's men.

"That's wishful thinking on your part, Pet," Coil said.

Dinah's shoulders slumped. "One hundred percent chance I cooperate if you let her stay with me."

Citrine snorted again. "Does the child think she actually has leverage?"

Coil, though, seemed to consider. "Think of this, my dear Citrine. Once an asset is expended, you've lost it forever. Grue served me well while he lived, perhaps young Aisha will see the light as well. After all, I pay very well. Perhaps we can come to an agreement, Miss Alcott. I'll buy your services with young Miss Laborn here as collateral."

"Oh, fuck you…" Aisha's rant ended in a scream when Coil's captain casually shot her in the thigh. The scream turned into deep, body-racking sobs as the girl rolled onto her side and clutched her leg.

"Of course, this is dependent upon all parties cooperating," Coil added.

Dinah climbed out of the car and this time none of Coil's men moved to stop her as she knelt down beside the sobbing Aisha. "We'll cooperate," she said softly.

"Well, then I shall conclude our business. Citrine, as always I thank you for your assistance. Please let Accord know I should be reestablished in Brockton Bay before the end of business today."

"I will," she said with a clipped, professional tone.

Aisha, her head still ringing and now her thigh bleeding and burning with pain, heard Dinah Alcott lean over and whisper, "Just wait. Coven's going to come for us. You'll see."

~~Simurgh's Son~~

~~Simurgh's Son~~

"Harry!"

Stephanie Schneider, known to the papers of San Francisco as Schism, watched under a strangely itchy invisibility as the young man who literally saved her life surged forward toward the stunningly beautiful blonde woman who in just two days had taken over the education of the children of the Birdcage. The two came together in a hug that didn't make Stephanie jealous so much as sad. No one had hugged her like that since her mother died.

Stephanie was fourteen when a grocery truck screamed onto the highway without yielding, slammed into the side of the family car, and sent the sedan flying off the upper deck of the highway, down twenty feet and directly into a concrete embankment. There was no gang involved, nor any capes—simply a careless driver running late for a delivery.

She didn't realize at the time that it was her power that allowed her to part the seatbelt that held her trapped in the burning car, just like it was her power that cut the door in half and let her pull herself out on a pair of broken legs. Her power couldn't help her save her parents, though.

It wasn't until weeks later, in full-leg casts, that she realized she was the one responsible for all the breakages that occurred around her. She had a power—the ability to split any surface within eye-sight. Which did nothing at all to help her legs heal, or bring her parents back. She had an uncle in Los Angeles, but he was a revolving-door prisoner for drugs that CPS didn't consider viable.

She went into foster care, and she had to admit the Schmidt family tried very hard. But she was fourteen, and she'd just lost everything she loved and gained something she hated. She spiraled down uncontrollably—her grades plummeted and her lack of friends just made things worse. She stopped eating, and even stopped bathing in some half-conceived notion nothing mattered any more. Walking hurt, since her legs never healed as well as they should have, and she ended up with a slight limp.

When she was fifteen, and very seriously considering just ending it, she followed the smell of pot to a group of kids under the bleachers. At the time she hoped she could beg a hit off them. Instead, she found the most popular kids in the school talking about her, of all people.

Of how pathetic she was. About how pathetic her parents must have been to leave her without a trust fund.

"Someone should just fucking put her out of her misery," one boy—one of the most handsome in the school—said. "Where's the Siberian where you need her?"

The others laughed uproariously, and Stephanie glared at the heavy steel and wood bleachers above them until every support cracked simultaneously and the entire structure slammed down directly on the twelve kids, killing most instantly, though one moaned piteously for five minutes until that sound ended.

Even three years later, Stephanie could hear that moaning in her sleep. The trial took a year, sentencing six months. Within a week of her arrival in the Birdcage, she was beaten and given to the brutes on the men's side as a sex toy, and a year later had her baby boy. She didn't even know who his father was.

She'd learned the horrible lesson so many women had learned through the eons of the human condition—men were vicious, brutal animals. And women could be just as bad.

But some…were not.

Mage pulled back from Canary enough to study here.

"You look good. Other than…" he made a point of touching a black ring of bruising around her neck. "The fuck?"

"The shock collar," Canary explained. "They used it on me until I mastered Taylor."

Rather than curse or shout, Mage simply hugged her again before looking around the room. "Taylor?"

"Come on."

The beautiful blonde led Mage, Lustrum and the still invisible Stephanie behind them into another room further into the cell block. Inside the undecorated room, sitting awkwardly on the edge of a bed, sat a girl that made Stephanie pause in confusion.

Unlike the blonde, this girl wasn't what Stephanie thought of as beautiful. Her black hair was shaved almost to her skull, revealing a long neck covered in bruises. Her mouth was wide, with thin lips and eyes slightly too large for her angular face. Hers was not a beautiful face, striking perhaps, but not cute or beautiful. Her prison jump suit hung flat against her chest and bent glasses hung on the end of her nose.

Stephanie, having to survive solely on her tits and ass for the past year and a half, didn't see the appeal.

And yet, she could see in Mage's response that this homely-looking girl meant something more to him even than the blonde. He stumbled in a strangely innocent manner when he started to rush toward Taylor, only to halt at the last minute as if unsure of his welcome.

The girl's reaction was almost amusing. Stephanie could see in her wide, expressive eyes and mouth an expression that went from open relief, desperate need, to confusion and alarm that Mage paused. Stephanie was sure Mage didn't hug her because he wasn't sure she wanted him to, and could see obviously that the injured girl felt hurt because she thought he didn't hug her because he didn't want to. The whole situation reminded her of a short story she'd read in high school, before she was arrested. It was at once touching, and also just a little frustrating.

"So, are they going to make out?" she blurted, hoping Canary might know.

"You know, being invisible doesn't work if you talk," Mage said dryly as he lifted the charm.

Stephanie glanced worriedly at Lustrum, who simply glared back.

Mage, though, had turned his attention back to the girl. He started to talk only for his voice to crack as if he were thirteen. He repeatedly cleared his throat before trying again.

"What happened?"

Taylor stared, her face going blank. Shutting down. Stephanie recognized it because she'd done the same thing so many times. "I killed Legend."

Abruptly the awkwardness broke.

"I _know_ that," Harry said. "Paige told me, and the news, and Marquis, and pretty much anyone who watches television. I meant your arm and leg, and your hair, Doofus."

"Oh, so no 'Hi, Taylor.' 'I hate to see you thrown in an inescapable prison for the rest of your life for something that wasn't your fault, Taylor.' 'What can I do to make this shit situation better, Taylor?' No, instead I get, 'Doofus' Taylor. God, Harry, you are such a fucking…"

Finally, _finally_ , he kissed her. He knelt down, wrapped her in his arms, and kissed her. And Taylor kissed him back, moaning with anguish and pain and longing all in one indescribable sound that made Stephanie's eyes burn. God, she wished someone would hug her like that.

"They're like little puppies, aren't they?" Lustrum muttered behind them.

"They've had a rough couple of months," Canary said. "We all have."

Finally the young couple parted. Without a word, Harry vanished the cast on Taylor's right forearm to expose the black and blue bruising underneath. She hissed as he placed his hand on it, only to relax as the color faded.

"Shit, he really is a healer?" Lustrum sounded amazed.

"He's a wizard," Paige explained. "Not a cape. Our resident thinker gave up trying to explain what he could do, because it's not cape power. It's magic."

As the two older women spoke, Stephanie watched intently as Harry removed the cast on Taylor's leg and placed his hand on her bare, black and blue thigh. Like with her arm, in moments the discoloration went away. Finally, he pointed at her shoulder.

Stephanie tried not to smirk at just how brilliantly red Taylor's cheeks turned as she unbuttoned her shirt enough to lower the right side off her shoulder and mid-way down her arm. If the girl only knew where her boyfriend's hands had been….

 _No. I'm not going to be like that._ It was that self-pitying hate and jealously that got her in the Birdcage in the first place. Now, for the first time since she arrived, Stephanie felt a small tendril of hope, and desperately didn't want to ruin it by being jealous that the only decent boy alive seemed to be head-over-heels in love with an ugly girl with a shaved head.

An ugly girl who still had enough in her chest to catch at the edge of the jumpsuit when Mage exposed a poorly treated gunshot wound in her shoulder. The bruised flesh round it still looked orange from antiseptic.

"The bastards didn't help you at all before they sent you down, did they?" Mage breathed.

Taylor gnawed a lower lip but shook her head. "Alexandria brought me here personally. She ordered them to shave my head."

"We should go fucking TP her house to the stone age," Mage declared as he vanished all the bandaging to reveal the bullet hole itself. It looked black and swollen, and was surrounded by a pattern of small black burns. He placed his hand over it, causing Taylor to wince and look away.

Stephanie's cheeks heated up when Mage's act of healing caused Taylor's jumpsuit to drop enough to expose her. Mage, though, didn't even seem to care as he concentrated on the healing. Long after it should have been healed, he kept the hand on her bare shoulder before slowly, gently turning it to cup her cheek and neck with his palm.

Stephanie couldn't see his face, but she could see Taylor's. From the flaring of her cheek she must have known her breast was exposed. Harry didn't look at all, instead staring right into her brown eyes.

"We're going to be okay," he said. "Because there's nothing we can't do together, right?"

"Who're you trying to convince?" Taylor asked.

He answered by very slowly leaning over and kissing her collar bone before turning his head to lay his cheek against her shoulder. Taylor closed her eyes and leaned her head against his, not quite smiling. The first and only tear Stephanie had seen on the girl's face ran silently down her cheek.

"I…feel like we should leave them alone," Stephanie managed to say.

Beside her, Canary snorted laughter at the way Harry and Taylor jerked apart, as if only just realizing they weren't alone. Taylor flushed all the way down to her navel as she quickly put her shirt to rights.

Mage pushed himself back to his feet. "Sooooo…. Taylor, Paige, I've sorta taken D-Block. It's mine now."

"Two questions," Taylor asked, recovering quickly from the oddly touching moment before. "One, why? And two, how?"

"The why was simple—needed to get the breach. The how is…not nice. I had to kill Acidbath and two of his men. And yesterday, when I arrived, I had to kill Lung."

Stephanie had no idea who Lung was, but the two other women did.

Taylor stared. "Lung? You mean the only cape to go head-to-head with Leviathan and drive him off? When did they even capture him?"

"Well, to be fair, you and I are the only capes to actually _kill_ Leviathan, so is it really so surprising? And I have no idea when he got here."

Mage rubbed a hand through his hair. "Anyway, I have a space now. At least for a while. I doubt I can keep it. Hell, I doubt I should, but it's a space we can sit down and figure things out in. Will you come?"

"After all this, that's a shit question and you should be embarrassed asking it," Taylor said. She stepped forward, grabbed his cheeks and kissed him. "Canary?"

"You're my team," the blonde said with a smile and a shrug.

"Great! Oh, yeah, this is Schism." He waved to Stephanie. "You'd like her, life seems to hate her as much as it hates us. We need to get her baby back from some cape called Seagull or something."

"Crane," Lustrum said. "Crane the Harmonious, a pedophiliac master of cape-martial arts."

"I'm not complaining, Harry," Canary said. "But given the fact that the last time we saved a baby we almost killed Glory Girl and you got captured, are you sure?"

Harry met Stephanie's gaze squarely. "She had acid burns on her back just like me. Lost her parents in a car crash, like you, Taylor. Got sent here because she stood up to bullies. Taylor, but for the grace of Amanda that could be you. So, yeah, we're getting her baby."

Canary cleared her throat. "Okay, I'm probably asking for it, but who's Amanda and what does her grace have to do with anything?"

Harry frowned. "That's right, we never had a chance to talk after we killed Leviathan. So, it turns out that I just don't have memories of the wizard Harry Potter, I _am_ Harry Potter reincarnated from the universe that existed prior to this by God, who happens to be a ridiculously hot blonde woman named Amanda."

"I'm sorry I asked," Canary said.

"God, I am too," Taylor muttered. "We're going to forget we asked. So, like before. All in favor of helping Harry's new girlfriend who is _most definitely not_ an actual girlfriend get her baby back and recruiting her into Coven?"

"Aye!" Harry said, raising a hand.

"Aye," Canary said.

Taylor studied Stephanie for a moment before frowning and glaring at Harry. "You've seen her naked, haven't you?"

"Acidbath had just burned the shit out of her; I had to be able to heal her."

"Odd how you have to end up taking women's clothes off to heal them!"

"Your silk was magically reactive, that wasn't my fault!"

"You just got to see my boob!"

Stephanie stared, confused, as the two started arguing over Mage's penchant for looking at naked women.

Canary hovered to her side. "Schism, right?"

"Are they…are you going to help me get Peter back?"

"Oh, yes, that's not a problem," Canary said with a wry smile. "The fighting is just part of their courting. Taylor's rather insecure with her looks, and Harry's insecure about making emotional connections."

"What about you?"

To Stephanie's shock, Canary leaned forward and very gently wrapped the girl in a hug. "Me? I'm just scared of being alone. Come on, let's go save your baby."

Stephanie could not more have helped her tears than she could have stopped breathing. "Thank you."


	41. Desperation 7

A/N: Chap 40 review responses in my forums like normal. And now, Bruce Leigh against Skitter and the Gang.

Crane the Harmonious is so screwed.

* * *

 **Desperation 5.7**

Stephanie started to say something, but then stopped herself. Opening her mouth never worked out—people didn't care what she thought or wanted.

Taylor, of all people, noticed. "What?"

It sounded challenging, and Stephanie felt intimately aware that she was a cause of tension between Mage and his girlfriend.

Rather than answer, Stephanie dropped her eyes and assumed the submissive posture she'd been forced to learn in the Birdcage.

It made Taylor growl, almost like an animal. Stephanie looked back up, prepared to run, but Taylor didn't attack. Instead, her anger seemed to be focused entirely inward. Beside her, Mage—Harry—had a hand on her shoulder.

"You were the same way when the Bitches Three were on your case. Only there, they used words and pranks. Here, they sell you like meat, burn you and kill you."

Taylor took a deep breath and visibly calmed herself before turning to the newcomer. "Stephanie, how old are you?"

"Um, eighteen? I think? I'm not even sure what day it is."

"I'm fifteen, just barely. You're actually older than I am. You've been here longer than I have. I don't know shit about how this place works, and my power's useless here. If you have an idea that might help, then please speak up."

Stephanie looked from M…Harry to Paige, before pulling harshly at the ends of her hair. "Well, I'm just thinking about Crane. She's….she's not nice. Not like you. Not even like Lustrum. If we have to…you know, fight? It might be good to have someone else on our side too."

"Liiiiiike?" Harry drew the word out, leaning forward with arm extended as if about to bowl. It was ridiculous, but worked.

"There was another girl in my block who had kids, and Crane wanted them too. She has this crazy idea that she'll train all the kids here to be super-capes or something. The other girl told her to fuck off, and when Crane tried take her kids, she got burned."

"This other girl hurt Crane the Harmonious?" Taylor asked.

"Well, she…she makes this burning smog and stuff. Like the ash cloud from a volcano. She can cover the whole room, and Crane couldn't get by it. Her name is Qiana. She's…she was the only other nice girl in the block, you know? She tried to help me, but I think that's why Crane asked Shotput to gave me to Acidbath."

Stephanie looked from one face to another—all three were obviously considering it. She felt a small surge of jealousy at how well they all got along. It was Paige who broke the silence.

"You know, we're sort of in Cape Central. It'd be a shame not to do at least a little recruiting."

Taylor snorted. "I don't know, Paige. People here aren't exactly the kind we're interested in."

It took a moment for Harry to catch on. "Oh, wow. Yeah, this is the largest concentration of capes in the Western Hemisphere, isn't it? But Taylor's right. Nice people don't get sent to the Birdcage."

Paige stared intently at him until he realized what he'd just said.

"Right," he said with a cute blush, acknowledging the utter irony of his statement. "So, that's me being stupid. Nice people can get screwed just as hard as bad people. So, this Qiana, is she in Crane's area?"

"No, she's in Ingenue's block," Stephanie said. "Block M, third level. Crane is in Block S on the second level."

"Right. Will Ingenue give us any grief?"

"She'll probably try to seduce you," Stephanie noted. "I'd recommend against it. Her boyfriends tend to go insane and kill people. I mean, could be worse. Glastig's in the sublevels. That's one cape we don't' want to get near. But Ingenue's in here because of how badly she fucks up any man she gets around."

"I also recommend against falling for any other woman's seductions," Taylor said with a hard stare at Harry.

"Right. How 'bout I just be invisible, then?"

~~Simurgh's Son~~

~~Simurgh's Son~~

Ingenue neither noticed nor cared who entered her block. There were no guards, just women talking or doing the chores of daily life. It felt less like a prison and more like an apartment…

A woman screamed in pain before being blasted out of a door in a concentrated stream of fire. Rather than burn, the tall, muscular woman climbed to her feet and started cursing in Spanish before rushing back in to the sound of high-pitched screaming and heavy thuds.

 _Never mind,_ Harry thought _._

It was a unique experience walking through a women's prison block invisible. He kept thinking of the 70's sexploitation films that Justinian liked to watch so much, and felt like he should be seeing lots of inexplicably beautiful naked women running around.

There were a lot of women, but most were older, heavy-set, or Case 53s who barely looked human. They all wore clothing, though he did catch a glimpse of one woman walking around pant-less. She had a shirt on, but was naked from the waist down. Unfortunately she looked like she weighed 500 pounds and had so many folds of fat he couldn't see anything.

 _Probably just as well._

They reached their destination and inside a cramped cell found woman who looked older than Stephanie and twice as strong. She stood up in alarm when they entered. Strong chin, heavy cheeks and dreadlocks pulled back into a simple, artistic bun at the back of her head. On the floor, crawling around with big, drooling smiles were a set of twins in nothing but cloth diapers.

"Holy shit, Stef, that Crane-fucker let you back in?"

Stephanie tugged at her hair and shrugged. "No, not really. Um, some friends saved me from Acidbath. I'd…I'm gonna try and get Petey back, Qiana. Could…I mean, will you help me?"

Qiana stiffened before looking first at Skitter then Paige. Harry, of course, was still invisible.

"I do that, she'll come after me again. And you know that Ingénue bitch won't do shit to stop her. This ain't like Lustrum's block where the girls look out for each other. Ingénue just don't give a shit."

"Qiana, hi." Canary said.

Qiana studied the smaller woman suspiciously. "What do you want?"

"I was wondering why you got sent to the Birdcage?"

"Why'd you?"

Paige shrugged. "Originally? I told my ex-boyfriend to fuck himself. I'm a master—he cut his dick off and tried to do just that."

Qiana snorted. "Serves the bitch right. Me? Brother was a gang-banger. I guess I woulda been, ain't too many paths outa Sunnyside, the shithole part of Houston we grew up in. We hopped to Tijuana to pick some shit up, fought the cartel 'n lost. They shot LaShaun, took me as payment. Triggered that night and …and they all died. Mexican government tried me and I got sent to the Birdcage."

"If it happened in the U.S. the Protectorate would have stepped in and made her a probationary ward," Taylor said. "Usually trigger events get some consideration. Well, usually."

"Cartel owned the judge," Qiana said. "Mama lost her boy to the Cartel, and her baby girl to the Birdcage."

Harry let his spell fade. Qiana grabbed both her babies so fast they started crying, while behind her the air took on a shimmer of heat and a hint of ash. "Who the fuck are you?"

"Hi, I'm Mage. Skitter'n me killed Leviathan a few days ago. That's her, by the way," he said, pointing to Taylor. "We're recruiting for our gang, Coven. Benefits right now include all of D-Block, though I'll admit that might change, and unlimited wine and the best tasting food. Plus Paige here is a teacher. In return, we'd like your help getting Stephanie's baby back. What do you say?"

"Best food?" Qiana asked. "Like what?"

Harry removed a half-eaten ration bar and transfigured it into a King Burger. Steam wafted off it as he handed it over.

"The fuck is that?"

"It's a ration bar that I've transfigured into a King Burger," Harry said. "When you eat it, it's still a ration bar. But while you eat it, it looks, feels, tastes and smells like a King Burger. Go ahead, take a bite."

She did, and moaned a little. "Holy fuck," she muttered. "How the fuck you do this?"

"Magic," Harry said. "So, you with us?"

"Fuck yeah!"

~~Simurgh's Son~~

~~Simurgh's Son~~

"Duh duh, _duh-duh_ , duh duh, _duh-duh_ , duh duh, _duh-duh_ , duh duh, _duh-dhu_ …didi-dooo, didi-dooo…"

"Fuck's wrong with you, boy?" Qiana said.

Harry pouted. "It's the Mission Impossible theme! Come on, we're going to go fight some super Cape Bruce-Lee, we have to have the right music."

"It's irritating!"

"It's appropriate!"

"Harry, it's irritating," Taylor said.

"Fine!"

Moments later, he started whistling the theme.

Taylor sighed, while Paige just shook her head. Qiana stared hard at Harry a second before very deliberately slapping the back of his head. _Hard._

"What was that for?"

"You were whistling," she said.

"So what? You don't hit a person for whistling!"

" _You_ don't. I do. Don't whistle."

"Next thing you're going to tell me I can't make sex jokes."

"I _will_ burn you," Qiana said.

"I think we found our sexual harassment policy," Paige said to Taylor.

"A right hook works too," Taylor said.

They approached the cell block, and not entirely surprising they could see women stepping out of the gate to meet them. At the lead was a tall, spindly woman with pointed, bird-like features and short, feathered platinum hair. Feathered as in Farrah Fawcett (Amanda bless her soul!), as well as feathered like Paige in that she had a few bird-like feathers growing out of her skull.

Her lieutenants stood with the casual ease of trained fighters.

"Well, are you all ready for a fight?" Harry muttered.

Before the anticipated fight could begin, Paige stepped forward and with a large, gentle smile said, "Good morning, Crane the Harmonious. Could you please bring us Schism's baby? She's joined our gang."

Her voice had a wonderful, musical quality to it that made the Simurgh's song in the back of Harry's head hum with approval.

There was no internal fight for control. Crane simply stood and nodded.

"Sure," she said in a reedy, prickly voice.

Her lieutenants watched incredulously as their block leader disappeared for a few minutes before returning with a rather healthily rotund little baby in her arms. Paige took the baby. "Thank you."

"You're welcome," Crane said in a high-pitched, grating voice.

Paige turned to rejoin the group when Harry saw an odd spherical glimmer in the air in front of Crane. He just had time to cast a shield to intercept the almost lazy spinning wheel-kick that would most certainly have sent Paige sprawling.

"You _dare_ try to master me?" Crane hissed.

 _Of course,_ Harry realized. _Once Paige's request is fulfilled, the compulsion ends._

Which in this case meant Crane the Harmonious screaming to her lieutenants: "Kill them!"

Crane had quite a few fighters—seven or eight all told. Harry wasn't sure if it was seven or eight because one of them seemed to have disappeared. The remaining six surged forward with disconcerting grace and speed. Paige fell back quickly with Stephanie's baby in hand, Taylor by her side if only because she had no bugs to bring to the fight.

Harry and Qiana didn't hesitate. A glimmering blue shield appeared on one side of the group, while a burning wall of pyroclastic ash covered the other. A brute facing Qiana plowed right through it.

"Switch!" Harry shouted.

To his profound relief, she obeyed without question (or slapping him in the back of the head). He hit the brute with a blasting charm before re-establishing his shield. Unfortunately, in the second it took to do that Crane stuck.

Honestly, it didn't look like her lazy, slinky approach should have held so much power. She sort of _slid_ around that shimmering sphere she held in front of her, moving in a contortionist fashion until her foot met his face.

If not for his tattoos, the blow would have snapped his neck like a twig. As it was, it caused him to lose his shield and stumble away. In the meantime, the woman who disappeared suddenly reappeared again in front of Paige, where she reached for the baby only to have Taylor stomp-kick her knee and then make a strong right jab.

The woman could fight—not surprising being a lieutenant of a martial-arts cape. What surprised Harry was that Taylor held her own. She wasn't winning, but she wasn't falling flat either.

 _Oh, wait. Crane's hitting me again._

Crane was fast, sinuous and managed to pack an absurd amount of force into each punch and kick, of which she employed a vast number against him in a very short amount of time. A wall of pyroclastic ash surged toward them. Crane gracefully back-flipped over it. Harry, not so much. The cloud didn't hurt, but it definitely burned all his clothes off.

"Hey, I'm supposed to be the perv here!" He conjured new clothes for himself, and then while he was at it, conjured Q'onos firewasps.

Nearby, he heard a gasp as Taylor fell. In that split second of distraction, he felt the firewasps ripped from his control. They formed up in a tight swarm before slamming into the invisible woman, covering her in stings.

"Harry!" Taylor sounded exultant. "More!"

 _Oh, right. She controls bugs._

Crane frowned mightily as Harry raised both hands and conjured bees, firewasps, flying Vulcan _k'isha_ ants, and every other huge, alien bug he could remember from Harry Potter's many lives. He poured all his magic into it, but no matter how many he conjured, Taylor still instantly wrested control of them away.

He backed away and watched her wield her new army like a master strategist.

"Harry, the brute!" Taylor called, even as she sent the insects in separate tendrils after Crane and six of her remaining lieutenants.

The brute didn't look like Shotput—she looked like a delicate, frankly beautiful Asian woman who barely came up to Harry's shoulders, but who was invincible enough to plow through Qiana's pyroclastic cloud and send the other girl flying.

She then _flew_ after Qiana as a follow up.

"Right, Alexandria package," he muttered.

Harry apparated to stand between his newest gang member and the brute and summoned a shield which caused the brute to bounce back. She responded by opening her mouth and screaming.

Only, normal screams didn't vibrate the air so hard he could actually see the soundwaves, much less feel them slide right through his shield to strike he and Qiana both.

"Holy fuck I think I'm deaf!" Harry shouted.

"What?" Qiana shouted back.

"Send your ash down her throat!" Harry yelled at her.

"Blend your ass with a what?" she shouted back.

Harry began to suspect her hearing was even more affected than his. He had only a moment to consider it when the howling super-woman slammed into him so hard they both when flying against the far wall. She raised a hand to take his head off while gripping his neck in the other.

"Hey, before you kill me, could I see your boobs?" he asked.

She growled something at him that sounded vaguely Korean and then swung.

Harry apparated right out of her grip to a foot behind and turned to see her fist punch through the wall, which in turn exploded in a billow of compressed containment foam that utterly enveloped her. He turned away as she screamed in frustration to see how the rest of the fight was going.

The moment Taylor had bugs to work with, Crane was pretty much fucked. Even with parahuman speed and agility, a few thousand giant stinging, biting alien insects was more than even Crane the Harmonious could handle. One of her lieutenants had actually run away in terror—the rest were sprawled over the flour covered in vicious-looking welts and bite-marks.

"Holy shit, you're a fucking badass, girl!" Qiana still shouted. Harry could see blood trickling down her ears and a bruise forming on her chin where the brute got her.

Harry waved at her until she noticed. "What?"

He pantomimed cupping his ears to her, and after she nodded he healed both her ears.

"Anyone else hurt? Paige, Schism?"

Paige shook her head. Schism, holding her baby with tears in her eyes, also shook her head. Qiana stalked over to where Taylor knelt checking one of her victims.

"Girl, you are one mother-fucking badass! You got a limit on the bugs you can use?"

Taylor sighed and stood. As Harry got closer he noticed that the woman, whose face was unrecognizable under the welts and bites, was not breathing.

"I was hoping the venom and bites would all go away when the bugs did," she said to Harry.

Harry shrugged. "Those weren't glamours, they were conjured. They were physically really here. She dead?"

Taylor nodded, before looking at Qiana. "I saw how quick you switched off with Harry. You did good."

Qiana shrugged. "Plenty 'of fights in my time. But I ain't never seen a cape take out six other capes at once. That is some badass shit." She turned to Harry. "So, you can make food and bugs and shit? And shields and teleport at stuff?"

"Pretty much."

She nodded her head, but as she did so she kept looked from between him and Skitter. "You two really kill Leviathan?"

"He made the weapon," Taylor said nodding to Harry.

"She aimed with her bugs," Harry said, nodding back to Taylor. "And a cape named Flechette made the bullets we used. And a Ward name Vista lined up a clear shot. But yeah, we killed him."

"And you want me on your team?"

Harry shrugged. "I do now. You're smart, you can handle yourself…"

"And I need help keeping him under control," Taylor muttered. "So, we'll call this a win. Where are we going to live, Harry?"

"Well, let's go take a look."

It took several minutes of walking and multiple flights of stairs before they reached Lustrum's territory. The leader herself waited at the gate, flanked by several of her own lieutenants. She noted Stephanie's baby with a blank expression.

"Crane?"

"She was alive when we left her," Taylor said. "One of her lieutenants died. More may follow, I don't know."

She stared hard at Qiana, of all people. "Martin, what are you doing here?"

"Joined them," Martin said. She had one of her twins in hand, and a bag of supplies over her shoulder. Paige held her other girl, tickling the child's belly button to her delight.

"We're Coven," Taylor said. "Schism and Smolder are members of our gang. We'd like your permission to pass through the breech."

Harry was confused by the request, figuring they'd just go. Then he saw how Lustrum seemed to relax a little.

"There are rules to maintain the peace," Lustrum noted. "You've essentially declared war on Block S."

"Fuck that, we _won_ the war on Block S," Qiana declared. "Skitter there fucked them up, all of them, all at the same time. Mage here got Halmang caught in foam. We won, hands down."

"Who's next?" Lustrum asked.

"No one," Taylor said. "We only attacked the save a child. We have what we need, we'd like to leave in peace."

"Oh, right, weregild," Harry said. He conjured a plastic jug of water before transfiguring it to wine. "Here, a nice pinot. The jug will fade in in a day or so, so if you haven't drunk it find other containers."

Lustrum accepted it with a nod. "Go on through."

Like that, the newly reformed Coven left the women's block.


	42. Desperation 8

A/N: This chapter has no fights or heroic deeds. And yet I consider it one of the most important not just of this arc but of the story. It explains in large part _why_ Harry is the way he is, and sets the stage for the end of this arc and changes everything.

* * *

 **Desperation 5.8**

"Harry?"

"Yeah?"

"Panacea's dad is at the door asking for you."

Harry tried rubbing feeling into his face. He sat up in his bed that even after five cleansing charms still smelled faintly like piss, and saw Stephanie at the door holding her son Peter. He noticed she was standing straighter than the previous day, smiling whenever she looked down at her baby.

"Er, right. Thanks. Any idea what time it is?"

"Morning," she said with a shrug.

Without a clock, it was impossible to tell time short of…right. _Magic._ " _Tempus_."

The spell told him it was not even eight yet. He stood and popped his back and neck. His runes protected him from blunt force trauma, but he still ached a little from the previous day's fight. He looked around the small room he'd claimed as his own, wishing he'd cleaned it better before he passed out. More importantly, he wished…

He hoped, more than anything, that Taylor would come visit him like Marissa used to. He'd stayed up, staring at the ceiling and praying that she came. After their reunion and kiss, he thought she would. Even if they just sat and talked, he just wanted to be with her. She never came.

There were communal showers in the block, but given he was the only guy he elected to just do a cleansing charm on himself and his clothes before he wondered out toward the age line he'd drawn.

Marquis stood alone on the balcony looking out over the atrium, somehow making his orange jumpsuit look dignified. He leaned casually against the balcony rail while drawing on his cigarette. He straightened when he saw Harry and flicked the butt over the rail.

"Mage, I trust you're well?"

"Uh, yeah, I am. Thank you. Um…I'd invite you in, but I'm not sure all the girls are decent." Instead, Harry stepped across the threshold. "Sorry if I caused you any problems yesterday, but it was pretty important to me to find my gang."

Marquis raised a single brow. "You killed Acid Bath and Spike. Many would consider that a favor. However, I've come on behalf of the other block leaders to talk about the difficulties of you blocking off the…"

"Wanna switch cell blocks?" Harry blurted.

Marquis's irritation at being interrupted was overcome by confusion. "Excuse me?"

"I don't care if we have the breech or not. We had to beat down Crane the Harmonious pretty hard for one of our members, and Lustrum wasn't really keen on us staying. So we're kind of in exile. But Ta…I mean, we talked last night about how important the breech was to the prison. So, Coven is willing to switch cell blocks with you in return for free access to the Breech if we need it."

Marquis opened his mouth a moment before reconsidering. Finally, he said, "No other compensation required?"

"Er, if you could leave one of your TVs it might be nice. Acidbath burned all theirs. Really, I think Lustrum would rather deal with you anyway."

"That I doubt. I'll discuss this with the other cell block leaders, but I think that would be acceptable," Marquis said.

They shook on it and Harry walked back in, being keyed to the age-line. "Is everyone decent?"

"Decent and hungry," came the reply.

Harry wandered into the lounge that was previously Acidbath's room. Qiana, Stephanie, Paige and Taylor were all gathered around a scrounged, acid-pitted table with ration bars before them. Taylor, Harry noticed, looked upset at him for some reason, but he knew better than to ask about it.

"So, requests?" He changed each bar into the requested breakfast before changing his own to eggs, beans and steak. They talked as they ate, about Marquis and switching blocks. The air felt heavy, like one of Qiana's clouds or the feeling right before a thunderstorm.

It was Qiana who poked a hole in the silence. "So, we got our own block, I guess. We got Stef's baby back, my babies are safe at the moment. Beat down the Crane. Now what?"

Harry ran a hand through his hair. "Wild orgies?" he asked.

"I'm too tired to slap you," Qiana said.

Taylor wasn't. Nor did she pull the punch against his arm.

"Jeez, what'd I do to you?" he muttered.

Stephanie snickered but then looked appropriately somber when Taylor glared. Until Paige snickered, which set Stephanie off again. Harry looked confused while Taylor's cheeks burned and her jaw set like she was about to kill someone.

"What?" he asked. "No orgies, then?"

That just made Paige laugh harder. Even Qiana chuckled. "Boy, you got power but you ain't got brains, do you?"

"Ignorance isn't the same as stupidity!" Harry declared. "Just because I don't know what the fuck's going on doesn't mean I'm dumb!"

"We'll talk about it later," Taylor declared. "What I want to talk about is Leviathan."

"Why? He's dead."

Taylor sighed tiredly. "Harry, do you remember what you said before we killed him?"

"Not for certain, but I'm sure it had something to do with seeing you naked."

Taylor hit him again, if anything harder than before. "I'm serious! You said something about why no one could kill him. Do you remember? It was why you made the runes in the road!"

Harry stared blankly a moment, but in fact he was remembering. He remembered talking to Taylor on the glacier. Kissing her—their first real…

"Why's he smiling?" Stephanie asked.

Harry blinked and looked around the table of women. "Er, sorry. Remembering before Leviathan."

He noticed Taylor's cheeks were red too.

"They must have gotten a quickie in before the fight," Qiana guessed.

"No!" Taylor shouted.

"I wish," Harry said. "That would have been awesome! Our first and last liaison before a battle against an Endbringer! You know, they'd probably make movies about it."

"They'd make Porn," Taylor said. "And I would never do anything that stupid, especially with _you."_

Harry stared, suddenly hurt and confused by the anger in her voice. "Um, yeah, sure. Okay. So, what is it you wanted me to remember, then?"

Taylor's chin set, but the blush paled as if she had a terrible thought. She glanced at Paige who wasn't laughing. Harry got even more confused.

"Fine, when you figure it out I'll be in my room."

He left, no longer hungry, and heard Qiana saying, "Girl, you're as stupid as…"

He turned into his room. He started to slam the door shut, but then changed his mind. What was the point?

Instead, he settled down onto his bed, prepared to fugue out and see if he could pull on some of his past life's wisdom to try and figure out what the hell was going on with Taylor. He didn't get much past feeling drowsy again when the door opened and Taylor stood in the frame.

"What?" he asked. He didn't mean to sound brusque, not really.

Taylor shut the door behind her before looking around the room in disgust. Cleansing charms cleaned, they didn't declutter. He hadn't had a chance to really clean everything out. With no chairs, she sat on the end of his bed, looking down at the floor. Her head was bowed and she sat pulling her fingers for some reason as she stared everywhere but at him. She was pulling at her fingers almost viciously, as if they had offended her somehow.

"You didn't…" She stopped and took a long, ragged breath. "You came. You came and rescued me, and healed me. You _killed_ for me. I get that. You kissed me and…and…and I thought that _meant_ something. I thought you were…"

"Didn't seem like it meant anything just now," Harry said, unable to hide the hurt.

"Why didn't you come last night?" Taylor finally asked. She looked at him with red, bleary eyes. "You just went off and hid in your room. I waited and waited, but you never came and…" She stopped.

Harry, though, stared. "I…I was waiting for you. All night. When I was with…Sundancer never let me into her room. I just thought…"

"Marissa was using you to scratch an itch," Taylor said. "She…anyway, I just thought…"

They both just sat for a moment before Taylor spoke again. "Steph is pretty."

"Yeah."

"She said you healed her. All over."

"Well, Acidbath really did a number on her. I can't heal my own burns but I could at least heal hers."

"Did you like touching her?"

 _Danger! Danger!_ Harry wasn't _that_ stupid. "I didn't think about her body, I thought about the burns. Some were really bad. When she was healed, she got dressed and we went to find you."

"You didn't care that she had nice tits, and curves like a real woman and…"

"And she wasn't you," Harry whispered.

Taylor stared intently at the floor, though he could see her furious blush running up her cheek into her hairline.

Harry stumbled on, realizing for once silence _wasn't_ the answer. "Look, in these memories of mine, Harry Potter always had five wives. Most of the time they were either picked for him, or volunteered, but when they bonded, that was it. He was like a fucking soul vampire—they anchored his soul in the world. My childhood was like being caught inside the most intense three-dimensional interactive porn set you could ever imagine. But none of it…it didn't _feel_ real. They didn't date, they didn't argue. They were bound together by his magic and everything between them was just fucking hunky-dory perfect.

"Unlimited sex, magically reinforced happiness and children. That's what I grew up remembering. Perfect sex, perfect happy women and the perfect, happy husband. When he wasn't fighting wars or killing gods or what have you. It wasn't until I was fourteen before I realized that's not the way the real world works, and I was utterly lost. I don't _know_ how to do…this!" He motioned between them.

"I don't know how it's supposed to work in the real world. I don't have that magic he had to make you perfectly happy, and I wouldn't want it anyway. I don't want to charm you into being happy, I just want to…I want…"

He paused when he felt a tear run off his cheek. "I heard it said that I can't _make_ you be happy. I can't force an emotion on you. I don't want to. But I…Taylor, I…dammit it. Just…damn it!"

Then she was kissing him. Not their odd, slightly confused dating kisses. But a searing, burning kiss like they shared before they killed Leviathan and everything went to shit. He kissed her back, pouring everything he _was_ into her. She moaned slightly before she started pulling at his jumpsuit.

They didn't talk. No empty platitudes; no empty words at all. He pulled her suit off as she did his. No foreplay, nothing like what he saw in his memories. Instead, just desperation and desire and a terrible, overwhelming need as she straddled him with a gasp.

He squeezed her as close as he could as they developed an awkward, inexperienced rhythm that soon turned into a frenzy of movement.

For one moment, everything was perfect. After, she sagged against him before they both collapsed back into his smelly mattress. He felt utterly, physically spent and at the same time, it felt as if all the terrible shit that had been heaped on them just didn't matter. He had an arm around Taylor's narrow shoulders, and one of her legs draped over him as she contoured her body to his, and for one brief moment, everything felt right.

"So, think your dad will sic his dockworkers on me?" Harry asked.

Taylor chuckled, and that evolved into a full laugh as she pushed her face into his neck. "He'll definitely give you the 'hurt Taylor and die' talk," she said.

"Like there'd be anything left of me if I ever did." He turned on his side so that he could stare into her eyes. She stared back, a faint smile on her lips. "We're going to win," he said.

He noticed that when she smiled, her wide mouth actually made her stunningly beautiful. "Yeah."

She leaned forward to kiss him, and as she did so the urgency returned. Perhaps not as desperate, but there was a need that Harry responded to with the fervency of a teenager. It was actually even better, because they went slow enough to actually enjoy it more.

Finished a second time, Taylor actually stayed on top of him. She looked down at him, both hands on his chest.

"Rules," she said, firmly but not mean.

"Rules?"

"Rules. For this. For what we have. One, you're mine. I'm yours. I…I don't think I could share you. I know you have that super harem in your memories, but that's not real."

"Okay."

"Stop asking to see random girl's tits."

"Oh, come on!"

She wiggled her butt. Given where she was situated, it caught his attention immediately. "Fine, fine!"

"Give me space when I need it." She paused a little. "I've been alone along time. Sometimes… I just need quiet. It's not because of you or anything. I'll…I'll come to you when I'm ready, if that happens."

"What if you don't?" Harry asked. He hated how vulnerable the question made him sound.

"No more than two hours, then," she said.

"Okay. Are we…will you stay with me? I mean, will we…live together?"

"We're in prison, Harry. It's not like I can move out and get my own apartment."

"What if…?"

"Yes, Harry, I want to live together. I want to be with you. After all the shit we've been through, I'd like that much at least."

He couldn't help but sigh in relief. "Good."

It was funny how she blushed. "You were worried I'd leave you?"

"That's what…well, yeah."

"Normally it's the other way around, you know. The boy gets laid and then he leaves."

"I don't want to just get laid," Harry said. He met her gaze. "I want you."

"Harry, I'm a bit chaffed. Don't make me have to fuck you again, okay? Not right now."

They both laughed at that before he took a turn. "Rules. Stop hitting me. I…it reminds me of how Justinian used to get my attention."

She leaned over to gently kiss him. "No more hitting. There will be more rules, but those are the important ones."

"Agreed."

She climbed off him and the two scooted back until they were sitting against the wall. "So, I guess…oh, yeah! Your runes, the ones that trapped Leviathan. How did those actually work?"

"It was a dimensional sink," Harry said, struggling to remember. "It forced Leviathan's entire existence into our dimension, which made him a little more vulnerable and slowed his regeneration speed."

"What does a dimensional sink do?"

Harry took a long breath as he considered it. "It's…complicated. It's one of those things that Potter knew how to do, but only just barely understood. His wives understood it better, but they were so much more evolved than he was at that point their brains were wired to understand things that we really struggle with. It…the runes created a multi-dimensional gravity well, I guess you could say. The energy of them reached across all the possible dimensions of existence, forming a universal constant that pulled anything in even partial contact with our dimension wholly into our dimension. I can't tell you the science or math behind it."

He stopped talking when Taylor's hand on his chest distracted him. He glanced at her face, but she didn't even seem aware she was doing it. Her eyes were out of focus as if she were thinking about something.

"Taylor?"

"Tell me about Amanda."

"Amanda?"

"You know? God?"

"Oh, yeah. Well, I guess…the first time Potter met her was around 2900 AD, by our calendar. She was Q, a race of near-omniscient, near-omnipotent beings that came into existence when the Universe was created. In a sense, they _were_ the Universe, because when I led the final Mage invasion of the Q Continuum and destroyed it, we mortally wounded the universe itself. It should have continued easily for another hundred billion years, but instead the universe died just four billion years later. Amanda took me there, to the End of All Things. I think she wanted to kill me, but instead I healed the wounds the war had given her. I…well, Potter was all about sex, you know? I guess that power applied to goddesses as well as girls. They made love—right there at the end of everything—and she ripped the Universe apart. Potter ceased, but because she was a god to begin with, she somehow survived the death of our old universe and became the progenitor of our new one."

Taylor continued to play with the short hairs on his chest, snuggling close to him. "Potter killed these gods?"

"Well, Potter accompanied by a race of Mages that were sitting on three quarters of a million years of evolution and technomagic. The Q moved through time and dimensions during the war, and the Mages moved right along with them. A single Q could easily kill a thousand mages, but here were ten thousand mages for every Q."

She stopped playing with his hair and instead pulled away until she sat facing him. He couldn't help but notice how it caused her breasts to move—they were small, but absolutely perfect and…

Taylor sighed. "Harry?"

"Sorry. You're just…really beautiful. It's distracting."

She opened her mouth to complain before blushing. "You're just saying that because you got laid."

"I'm saying that because when you smile at me, Taylor, you're the most beautiful girl in the world." Unable to help himself, he leaned over and kissed her breasts.

"Damn it," Taylor muttered, before things got completely sidetracked for another twenty minutes, chafing be damned.

After, tangled up in a bed that no longer smelled just like piss, so close he could feel her breath, she said, "Could you still move us in time?"

Harry rested his head against her forehead. "Without some pretty advanced technology, I could only move us back a few days. But…it wouldn't move us physically, just temporally, and it'd be pretty hard. We'd be in the Birdcage a few days before we were due to arrive, and we'd have to hide from ourselves or the loop would collapse and we'd all die."

She accepted that without question. "Then…what about dimensions? Could you move us to a different dimension?"

"This is going to sound odd, but magically it's easier to time-travel than to hop dimensions," Harry said. "But…yeah, I probably could. It wouldn't be like my teleportation, though. It'd have to build a portal."

"What would you need?"

"Stone. Obsidian, if possible. Blood—mine and the blood of everyone we'd want to take with us. Time. Energy. We're inside a mountain—even if we changed dimensions, physically we'd still be inside a mountain."

Taylor absorbed the answer that that razor-sharp attention she had when thinking. Finally, she sat up. "Get dressed," she said. "We need to talk about this."

"Okay."

He cast cleansing charms on them both, fully aware of just how sweaty and stinky they were. The two started moving toward the door before Taylor paused and turned to him. She didn't say anything, just stared at him until he smiled and nodded.

"Yes," he said simply. Not a question, just a declaration. Acceptance.

She reached up to cup his cheek and smiled back at him, her eyes moist.

"Yes," she echoed. "They're going to tease us."

He could help but laugh. "Let 'em. I can turn their clothes into Chihuahuas that chase them around all day."

Taylor laughed and shook her head before leaning up to kiss him tenderly. "Come on."

Harry had no idea how long they'd been alone together, but it felt like hours. By the time they reached the lounge, however, the others were still sitting around the table talking as if nothing had happened. When they emerged, Qiana stood up and started clapping. Stephanie blushed but did the same.

Paige, however, smiled and shook her head before walking around the table and hugging the nonplussed couple. "It's about time," she said simply.

"Er, thank you," Harry said. "Is it that obvious?"

Qiana began to guffaw. Paige merely nodded. "There's a definite glow."

Taylor huffed before chuckling. "Right. So, we're together."

"You two are fun," Qiana declared. "Good food and a daytime soap in real life. Joining this group is the best move I ever made."

"And it might even get better," Taylor said. "Qiana, your power, can you make volcanic rock?"

Still smiling, Qiana shrugged. "Probably. Hard as shit, but yeah, I think so."

"How about obsidian?"

"Don't know, what the fuck is obsidian?"

"Black, volcanic glass," Harry said. He conjured a piece of raw obsidian and handed it over. Unfortunately, he knew his conjuration would last only an hour at best.

Qiana hefted it, studied it, and then oddly touched her tongue to it.

A moment later she stepped back from the table and raised both her hands. The air around her shimmered before her pyrotechnic cloud formed. The muscles in her arms bulged as she physically pushed with her arms and hands, using the motion to condense her own cloud until it ceased to be ash and began to clump and produce prodigious amounts of heat. She continued to push, grunting with the effort, until with a sigh a black rock appeared that, while in a different shape, had the same color and sheen as Harry's conjured stone.

As Qiana sank into her chair with an exhausted sigh, Harry rushed around the table and picked up the stone, only to drop it.

"Hot!" he exclaimed.

"You know, even I could have told you that," Paige said drily.

Harry stuck out his tongue before picking it up. "Runes. Didn't hurt, just…startled me.'

Qiana and Stephanie snickered as Harry cast a detection charm to confirm it was obsidian. He then stared wide-eyed at Taylor. "How'd you know she could do it?"

Taylor shrugged. "Her power expresses itself as volcanic, but it's more than just heat, or else it'd be just fire. The ash makes her a ferrokinetic. She controls volcanic rock—a volkinetic? Maybe. Since her ash expressed itself spontaneously—that made me think she might be able to generate a volcanic rock."

"Like obsidian."

"What's this about?" Paige asked.

Harry met her gaze before turning to look at Stephanie and Qiana. "It was Taylor who made me realize it, but…I think I might be able to get us out of here."

~~Simurgh's Son~~

~~Simurgh's Son~~

"…in return for free access for one year," Marquis finished.

Behind him stood the other cell block leaders. Gavel, among them, was a murderous Australian vigilante who had the habit of not just killing villains, but their immediate and extended families as well. Galvenate bulked huge, like an extra from a mob movie, while Teacher stood apart—slim and frail in appearance, but wielding a dangerous amount of influence and capes within the Birdcage. Radian wore a heavy beard and caused the air around himself to shimmer much as Qiana did, but his power was radioactive. Beside him stood Mason, a ferrokinetic who unlike Qiana didn't need heat to control stone. Finally there was the trump, Chimera, who woke up with three new powers every day.

They were some of the most powerful and dangerous capes to ever live, and were looking at Taylor, Paige, Qiana and Stephanie much like hungry men might stare at a Vegas buffet line, if such things still existed.

It was the age line alone that separated them.

Harry could tell just from Taylor's body language that she understood just how precarious their position was. These weren't lieutenants like Crane commanded. These were true supervillains, who not only outnumbered them, but easily overpowered them in theory. Harry was tempted to start conjuring bugs just in case.

"That sounds acceptable," Harry said. He was the spokesman for the group only because they were worried about these older men taking Taylor at face value, being a teenaged girl facing down villains who were all between thirty and forty years old. "However, we'll need to insist on some precautions. Marquis, I'd respectfully ask that you and your people evacuate Cell Block C before we move. We'll take possession of it, remove all obstacles to Cell Block D, and you can then take possession of this block."

"You're making things unnecessarily difficult, Mage," Marquis said, a hint of warning in his voice.

Harry shrugged. "We're respecting the fact that you are all powerful, and Coven is mostly female living in the male cell blocks."

"Not willin' to share the pussy, are you?" Gavel had a strong accent.

"Not mine to give away," Harry said.

"This is foolish," Radion said. Like Gavel, his accent was so thick as to be unintelligible, but instead of Australian his accent was near-Eastern—Indian or possibly Pakistani. "Why are we dealing with these children at all?"

"These children control the breech," Taylor snapped, done playing the silent woman. "These children fucking _killed_ Leviathan. When you've killed an Endbringer, then you can talk to us. Until then, shut up and let the grown-ups talk."

The air around Radion flared.

"Oy, keep that shit down, fucking sand-monkey!" Chimera shouted. Harry wondered if he was an Empire Eighty Eight man, with an epithet like that.

"You dare!" Radion turned onto his fellow cell block leader and raised a hand, only to be blasted off his feet and over the rail in a flash of green light.

Chimera dropped a hand and leaned over the rail to watch the man fall. "Sort of handy meeting up here," he noted. "Been wanting to do that since the fucker burned one of my men.

"Was Radion a flier?" Gavel asked with bored disinterest.

 _Thunk._

"Apparently not," Chimera remarked dryly.

Marquis sighed before looking at Harry and Taylor. "Again, you make things unnecessarily difficult."

"It really isn't," Harry insisted. "We just don't want to get attacked while moving. Evacuate your cell block to the atrium, let us move, and we're done. We won't mingle or anything."

Marquis sighed. "Fine. But I'll require an additional five gallons of wine."

"Done."

It took the better part of an hour for Marquis to clean out his cell block, but at the end of that time the five of them were safely ensconced in a cell block designed to hold up to fifty prisoners, with an age line across the main gates. They watched from the lounge as Marquis's people marched by toward the breech.

"You know, Lustrum hated Marquis," Taylor noted as they watched the procession. "He helped take her down."

"Well, that's not really our problem, is it?" Harry smirked.

Taylor smirked back. "Let's go claim a room."

"And then we get to work."


	43. Desperation 9

A/N: Chap 42 review responses are in my forums like normal. And don't be too shocked, but this is a happy chapter. And finally, on an unrelated note, Poll results are in and _Invincible_ won and will be my next story. Thanks for the 97 folks who voted.

* * *

 **Desperation 5.9**

"Got any juice left, Steph?" Taylor asked. Her legs strained from trying to keep Harry upright.

"Give me a minute." Stephanie leaned over, hands propped on her knees and sweat dripping from her face and causing her jumpsuit to stick to her. She was gasping for breath.

Paige held Stephanie's baby as the young cape fought for air in the oven-like cave that was all that stood between them and freedom.

Harry's portal worked, though barely. The arch was just high enough for them to run through bowed over, and lasted just long enough for Harry, Taylor, Paige, Stephanie, Qiana and their three children to rush through into a space Harry had carved with a dozen hastily-cast vanishing charms. Within seconds of crossing the dimensional threshold, the portal collapsed. Harry suspected the blood-infused obsidian itself had disintegrated.

The plan was for Harry and Stephanie to take turns drilling through the mountain until they reached fresh air, and then go from there. They had all their extra clothes, supplies and a few days' worth of ration bars in bags bundled together from torn up sheets. They'd used blankets to make poncho-style coats, since even Harry knew it would be cold in British Columbia, no matter what dimension they were in.

The first complication was just how hard it was to open the portal. Harry thought rebuilding their lair was hard. He almost killed himself destroying Leviathan. Powering the portal was even harder, draining him so thoroughly that if not for Taylor he would have collapsed.

That left just Stephanie and her power to split any surface she saw. She was splitting the rock in a rough, cylindrical passage just tall enough to let them pass without crouching, then reducing the stone into gravel. The problem was they had no place to put it and despite Harry's weak air freshening charms air was becoming an issue.

Qiana solved the space issue by handing her little girls to Taylor, which forced Harry to stumble upright or fall.

Qiana joined Stephanie at the front of their little party. Immediately the cave became unbearable hot as the gravel melted and flowed away to either side, into channels Stephanie quickly cut away for just that purpose. She made a treacherous, narrow walkway in what essentially became a convection oven.

"We can't take this heat long," Taylor said.

Stephanie nodded and started cracking the stone. Working in tangent with her friend, the two quickly bored through the mountain while Taylor and Paige carried the upset, fussing babies and Harry stumbled after, trying very hard no to fall into either of the narrow furrows of lava.

At least they had a little light.

His portal crossed dimensions, but not geographical space. As a result, they emerged in the middle of a mountain. They were cutting a slightly up-ward sloping path. They couldn't tell if they were going east or west, only that they were going slightly up. The angle not only gave them the best chance of actually leaving the mountain, but also helped angle the lava away.

"Snow!" Stephanie shouted the word excitedly over her shoulder.

Taylor stepped toward the wonderful, refreshingly brisk air that cut through the heat of the lava around them. Qiana's twin girls squirmed so much she was afraid she'd drop them, and they were big enough her arms were quickly getting tired.

But Stephanie was right—she could see a little window of light gray against the dark gray of the rock. Sunlight through snow.

With a grunt and a pushing motion, Stephanie cracked away the rest of the rock to reveal a wall of snow that fell inward and onto the quickly cooling trails of Qiana's lava. Water ran down the two trails, making the rock steam and crack loudly. Beyond the opening, Taylor saw beautiful, crystal-clear blue sky.

Taylor gave Stephanie a pat on her shoulder, acknowledging the older woman's work and drive, before she stepped to the edge of the hole. A part of her prayed they wouldn't find themselves on the edge of a ten-thousand foot drop into hell, but the way they're luck ran she wasn't going to bet against it either.

She reached the edge, and then stumbled past it and simply stood, staring. Beside her, Stephanie gasped. "Holy…I just…wow."

Qiana, Paige and finally Harry stepped out of their little cave, and like Taylor all they could do was stop and stair.

"I knew places like this existed," Taylor whispered. "I just never dreamed I'd ever see them."

They stood on the side of a snow-filled mountain looking over an almost fairy-tale valley floor filled partially with a long glacial lake that shimmered brilliantly in the afternoon sun. A small town meandered gracefully around the lake itself, inching up the sides of the mountain they stood on. Below, wide, bare trails of snow wove enticingly through thick groupings of pine trees. Cold air bit them through their jumpsuits, but the brilliant sun at the same time warmed them, making the cold somehow tolerable.

Taylor glanced up and gaped as she saw gondolas passing overhead. In the distance, she could see even more crossing another valley to a neighboring mountain. The pieces started to come together until she realized what she was looking at.

"It's a ski resort. That's just…fuck. Fuck! In our world this is a parahuman prison, and here it's a fucking sky resort? How is that even fair?"

"What are we going to do?" Stephanie asked.

"We don't know if this world has capes," Taylor said. "So, we keep our heads down. Harry, you have any magic left?"

"Transfiguring clothes? Check. Maybe conjuring a sled for us? Check. Flying or dimension hopping? Definite no."

"Do what you can, please."

She glanced back to see him sigh and visibly try and pull himself together before he started transfiguring. All their bright orange jumpsuits turned into surprisingly warm black one-piece black ski suits. The babies got yellow to stand out.

"Hey Steph, break me off a piece of rock the size of a person, maybe?" Harry asked. His words slurred from exhaustion.

Stephanie actually swayed as she did so, as tired as he was. The crack of the breaking rock sounded almost like a gunshot. Harry transfigured it into a large two-piece sled that looked almost like a ski-mobile, in that the front set of rails could pivot on a simple connected pole to steer the larger platform in back.

It looked—embarrassing, actually. "Harry, don't suppose you could just teleport us all down there?"

He shook his head. "One, too tired. Might splinch us all. Two, not supposed to apparate kids under four or five. Ever. Could hurt cognitive development. Don't worry, I'll put a notice-me-not charm on it, no one will care how ugly it is."

"That's good, 'cause it _is_ ugly," Qiana said.

"Actually, Harry, any chance of getting skis and boots?" Paige asked. "It's been ages, but I was a pretty good skier."

Harry shrugged tiredly and complied. "Okay, I know how to steer this so we don't all die. Pile on, Paige you can lead us down."

"Think it's still May?" Stephanie asked. "I mean, different dimension and all."

"It's still May," Harry said. "Same position around the sun. It's just a fucking mountain top in Canada, they probably have snow up until June. If they don't have Endbringers, then they probably don't have the level of global warming we have either."

He sounded bitter, or jealous. Taylor couldn't blame him—in her wildest dreams, she'd never have imagined any place so utterly, ridiculously beautiful as what they saw before them. It was hard to take her eyes off it.

Somehow Taylor was expecting a wild, dangerous ride down the mountain top in their over-sized sled. Instead, Harry travelled in a zig-zag fashion down the slope, moving from side to side to control their speed.

"How do you know how to do this?" she asked.

"Memories," he said around a yawn.

There were other skiers—hundreds of them. They didn't ignore the huge sled—they skied around it easily enough. They just didn't seem to really notice or care how big or ungainly it was. Paige skied beside them, nodding in approval at Harry's unusually cautious approach.

"Why are we going so slow?" Taylor asked. "It's going to be dark before we reach the bottom of the slope!"

"No brakes, and there are babies on board," came the response.

 _Huh._ Taylor had no answer to that, because he was right. She glanced back to when she heard a loud, "What that, mama?"

Bee and Tee were the twin's names, short for Beatrice and Tiana. Taylor couldn't really tell the twins apart, so she wasn't sure which one was pointing.

"That's a tree, baby."

"What's a tree, mama?"

 _And that right there is why our world sucks,_ Taylor thought bitterly.

These kids had never been outside before. Bee seemed to be eating it up, but Tee looked terrified as she stared up at an endless sky as if afraid she'd fall up into it at any moment.

Accompanied by a litany of "What's that, mama?" they approached the lower part of the slope just as the sun sank behind a distant mountain, throwing them all into shadow while the sky overhead shifted to a slightly darker shade of cobalt. Taylor couldn't see a single cloud in the sky.

They left the sled against one of the many lodges as they made their way out of the ski area. It reverted to stone almost the moment they climbed off. They didn't go very far before the smell of real food made every one of their stomach's growl loudly.

"We have no money," Taylor pointed out.

"We have a Master 8 who can make people do things by smiling and saying please," Harry pointed out.

"She doesn't like abusing her powers," Taylor said.

"Honestly, I'm okay with it if it gets us a real meal," Paige said. "Breakfast was a long time ago, and your magic makes ration bars taste good, but when we're done they're still ration bars. I want real food. And maybe a place to sleep. And that's barbecue I smell."

Taylor glanced around their group before shrugging. "Sounds good to me. Let's go!"

Despite the late hour, there were still plenty of skiers coming in from the slopes. Though the well-maintained pavestone trails between the many high end shops, restaurants and lodgers were mostly clear, she saw snow piled around trees or against walls in shadows. People walked around laughing and talking as if they had no cares in the world—Taylor found herself looking for ABB or Empire tags, but of course found nothing.

"I don't wanna alert none of ya'll or anything," Qiana said. "But I may be the only black person in this town."

Taylor snorted, while Harry shook his head.

"Nah, I saw a black couple walking that way." He gestured vaguely south. "So, you know there are at least two others."

Qiana snorted. "Wonder what'd they do if I bought a house?"

Taylor laughed, finding herself really enjoying the taller woman's company. It'd only been a few days, but she discovered Qiana had almost as biting a sense of humor as Lisa did.

If she chuckled, Paige opened laughed. "Maybe we should stay here just to see what they'd think."

They reached the door of what had to be the restaurant where all the wonderful smells were coming from. Harry's transfiguration of their clothes was convincing enough they didn't get a second glance as they were shown to a table large enough for them all. The front walls had been rolled up like garage doors, opening the warm interior to the cold evening in a clash of temperatures that somehow just made the smells that much sharper.

A friendly hostess took their drink orders—Harry decided to not push his luck by ordering beer. Then they saw their menu, and Taylor had a hard time not spitting out her drink.

"Twenty bucks for nachos?" she whispered.

"Well, I guess that'd be a concern but for two things," Harry said. "One, it's Canadian dollars. Two, we're not paying anyway. So, really, live it up. Nachos sounds pretty damned good."

"Damn right!" Qiana said as she bounced one baby on a leg, while Paige happily took the other.

All the time, the two toddlers kept pointing and saying, "What that, Mama?"

Or, "What that, Pag?" Paige was evidently hard to pronounce in toddler speak.

The hostess came back and they ordered enough food for an army, and this time Paige did order drinks since as far as the hostess could tell, with three babies at the table, they were all adults. Taylor wasn't sure Paige used her power or not, nor did she care.

The food came and no one glanced at them, or treated them like criminals or monsters. It was the most surreal experience Taylor had ever had. Even as she ate admittedly good food and a band started playing, she found herself staring at all the happy, laughing people and hating them for living something she'd never had a chance to even experience.

That's when Harry took her hand. She looked at him, with his squashed face and strangely bright green eyes and dark brows; she saw how he stared back, the hint of a wry smile on his thin lips.

"You ever dance?"

"What?"

He leaned forward, looking into her eyes, and said, "You ever dance?"

She stared, unsure if he was joking or not. "When I was ten, maybe."

"Then that's too long. Come on!"

"No," she said.

She felt a hand on her far shoulder and turned to stare at Paige.

"I'll make a deal," the blonde said. "You go dancing with Harry, and I'll sing."

"But…but…"

Harry squeezed her hand. "Our life is shit, Taylor. So tell me this, when do you think the next chance we'll have to dance in a restaurant bar like this will happen? I don't want to die without having had a dance with my girl. Please?"

He gave her the damned puppy-dog eyes.

"Fine," Taylor muttered. She found it odd that him calling her 'his' made her heart skip a beat. Her mother would have been appalled at the distressingly possessive term. Lustrum would have tried to kill him.

Paige handed Bee back to her mom and sauntered over to the outdoor stage where a small band played—a keyboardist, guitarist and drummer. When they finished their song, she walked right up to the stage and started talking to them. They agreed readily enough and Paige climbed up. She even grabbed one of their spare guitars before turning to stare meaningfully at Taylor.

"Fine," she muttered.

"Huzzah!" Harry cried as he jumped up and led the way to the dance floor, clutching Taylor's hands while a few table around them laughed at his outburst.

The laughter faded when the band started playing and Canary sang.

"My God she's good," Taylor whispered.

She felt Harry's hands take her waist and turned her attention back to him. "She is. Her singing is a gift to us. Let's use it."

They danced. Taylor couldn't say she was any good, but Harry surprised her by moving with a grace she'd never seen in him before. More importantly, he held onto her with a gentle determination, laughing sometimes just from the sheer rush of happiness he felt. It was infectious, and she found herself smiling back at him and blushing from the impossible, fairy-tale quality of their evening.

By the time Paige finished five songs later, they didn't have to use her power on the waiter to get out of their meal. She had enough tips to cover it all. They left the restaurant full, slightly lubricated and with a strange euphoria that Taylor could not remember having ever felt before in her life.

The strange feeling continued as they walked into the small town, which away from the slopes looked strangely…ordinary. Pretty, but ordinary.

Harry cast one of his weird spells and grinned.

"Fourth house on the right. Empty, probably a summer vacation home or something. Sound good?"

The others quickly gave their assent and in just a few minutes the five adults and three children found themselves in a beautifully appointed, three bedroom house. Solely because of the fact she had two children, Qiana got the master bedrooms. Paige volunteered to share with her, if nothing else to help with the kids.

"That works," Qiana agreed with a tired but happy smile.

Before she turned in, though, she walked over to where Harry and Taylor sat holding hands in a state of exhaustion on the couch, and knelt down to hug them both. She didn't say thanks or anything, but Taylor didn't need to hear the words to understand. She hugged the girl back and watched as she disappeared a moment later.

"You can take the second bedroom," Taylor said to Steph. "You and Peter. We'll take the small one."

Stephanie smile before wiping her eye.

"Thank you," she said. The sheer emotion she poured into the words made Taylor think she was talking about more than just having a larger room.

When they were alone in the darkened living room, Taylor laid down with her head on Harry's lap.

"It doesn't feel real," she whispered.

"Tell me about it," Harry whispered. "Hey, can I do something I've always wanted to do?"

"That depends on what it is?" Taylor asked.

He grinned before slipping out from under her head, kneeling in front of the sofa, and then to her shock lifting her bridal style in his arms. She wasn't a small girl—in fact she was as tall as he was and well-muscled. He didn't tremble as he carried her toward the smallest bedroom.

"You know, if this is just a dream, then I'm gonna damn well carry the girl of my dreams to bed. You know?"

"You're a complete fucking sap, you know that?"

"Yeah."

She sighed before putting her arm around his neck and kissing him. "Fine, my knight in shining armor. Let's ride off into the sunset together."

"Huzzah!" he said again, grinning as they reached the bed.

~~Simurgh's Son~~

~~Simurgh's Son~~

The house had no perishable food. It seemed to be a summer rental and they were still in spring, so the pantries were not just bare but dusty. The home didn't even have electricity on, though it did have running water. However, they still had a few ration bars that Harry magicked into a semblance of real food so that they could eat and have water while they discussed their next steps.

After the fairy-tale quality of their evening, Taylor half expected Qiana, Stephanie and Paige to want to stay in this seemingly idyllic world. That illusion ended fairly quickly when Qiana said, "When are we goin' back?"

"You don't want stay?" Taylor asked.

Qiana shrugged. "Place is nice and all, but it ain't home, you know?"

"They're going to be after us the moment we show up," Harry noted.

Again the larger girl shrugged. "Fuck 'em. I ain't backin' down from no fight."

Paige smiled fondly and actually patted Qiana's shoulder.

"I like her. And I agree. This world probably has its issues too, but it's not our world. I…we were making a difference, Taylor. Think of all the people we saved from Leviathan."

"And all that we killed," Harry muttered.

Paige shrugged. "That was sad, I can't make it right. But I guarantee you that Leviathan would have killed far more. I want to go back."

"I just…" Steph paused and looked around the table. "I just want to stay with you guys, wherever you go."

Taylor looked at Harry. He grinned and said, "I'm home wherever you are."

He then blinked when Qiana threw a roll at him.

"No lovey-dovey shit at the table!" She declared.

Harry frowned, and then ate the roll. "Jealous?"

"Boy, don't make me burn you."

Taylor found it odd how Qiana could make a serious threat and still have people laugh at it. Only, she wasn't serious, was she? People confused her.

"Okay, we go home," she finally said. "Now, how?"

"Fastest way would be by plane," Harry noted.

Stephanie quickly shook her head. "Not a good idea. If I slip, I could crack the plane in half. I…" She blushed. "I don't do well in the air. I'm sorry."

"Just as well, it would call attention to us," Taylor said. "Then that leaves a train or driving. And that's a long drive. A few days at least."

"How 'bout we find a ride down to Vancouver, and then pick up an RV," Harry said. "Remember that old pre-Scion Disney movie, about the two alien kids trying to get to a valley in California? I've always wanted to ride in an RV."

"You know Earth Aleph remade that movie," Stephanie noted.

"Yeah, and it sucked ass," Harry said with unusual heat. "They took something precious from my childhood and made it about a damned ex-wrestler playing a taxi-cab driver."

"So," Paige said before the discussion got any more derailed. "Any ideas about getting to Vancouver?"

"Find a bus and have you ask nicely?" Taylor said, grinning.

"That would probably work," Paige agreed.

~~Simurgh's Son~~

~~Simurgh's Son~~

While Paige might not have been the most powerful fighter, Taylor had to admit her power was frankly just as useful as Harry's. At her urging a shuttle driver who was on call for a local lodge was convinced to give them a ride. She sat up front talking to the besotted young man for the entire two hour drive.

At her urging, he even searched his van's GPS for a local RV dealership and dropped them off directly. Less than an hour later they pulled out of the driveway in a luxury-model RV that cost more than Taylor's dad made in five years.

Half an hour later, driving confusedly through the city, Harry said, "Wait! Pull in there!"

Paige did so, noticing it was a gold dealer. Harry grinned at them all before turning jumping off the bus. An hour later, he returned with an even bigger grin on his face.

"You conjured up gold and sold it," Taylor guessed.

"I _transfigured_ gold and sold it," he corrected her. He removed whole stack of bills. "In American dollars! Took quite the discount for that, but oh well. This should get us food and gas to make it cross-country! So, we need to get a GPS thingie, food and clothes, right?"

"Taylor, are you sure you don't want to share?" Stephanie asked, smiling. "I could kiss him right now."

Harry rolled on the balls of his feet and whistled, pointedly looking at everywhere _but_ the girls.

"Not sure he'd be worth much used," Taylor finally said. "I'd better keep him for now."

"So, shopping, and then we start home," Paige declared from the driver's seat.

Taylor thought that, just maybe, it might actually be a good day.


	44. A Clouded Path

A/N: Chap 43 responses are available in my forums like normal.

* * *

 **Interlude: A Clouded Path**

It took two hours to get through customs. Once again, Paige's smile and a few power-laced words got them through without any difficulty and they were soon on their way south toward Seattle.

They stopped in the parking lot of a shopping mall in Bellingham where Paige announced that everyone needed to learn how to drive the RV.

"There's no way I'm going to be able to drive non-stop across the country," Paige told them all.

"I'll go first!" Harry volunteered.

They spent the next four hours driving the RV around the parking lot of the mall. Mall security stopped them once, though of course Paige talked them out of it. A police officer stopped them a second time, with the same result, but by then they'd decided their driving roster well. Paige, Qiana, Harry and Taylor were all good enough. Stephanie, given her tragic experiences with cars in the past, found herself so nervous behind the wheel that she could barely make herself press the gas pedal.

Only when they were comfortable with the driving situation did they make their way into the mall to pick up a couple of sets of clothes and some toiletries (plus baby supplies) using Harry's money.

It was dark by the time they refueled, ate and set out heading east. Taylor took first shift driving with Harry to keep her company, since no one wanted to risk the driver falling asleep.

"Hope Lisa and Jess are okay," Harry said as they left Seattle behind and turned east on Interstate 90.

"She was still on the roof when our portkeys activated," Taylor said. "She was with Vista and Flechette. Even if her portkey didn't work, I bet Vista could have gotten her out safe enough."

"The fact she wasn't in the Birdcage makes me think you're right. Still, I hope."

"I just hope dad's okay," Taylor said.

"He was in the lair. I'm sure he's fine."

"So was Paige."

Harry had no answer to that. Instead, he just looked out the window at the surprisingly desolate landscape of eastern Washington. After the breathtaking beauty and greenery of Vancouver and Seattle, the fact that a good portion of the state was so…empty seemed odd.

A few minutes passed in peaceful silence before Taylor said, "What are we going to do when we get back?"

"Been trying not to think about it, to be honest."

"They're going to come after us."

"Yeah." Harry sighed and slouched further into his seat. "Just trying to figure out why they killed Legend. It doesn't make sense. He was one of their most powerful."

"He was going to say something that someone didn't like," Taylor said. She thought back to that terrible moment. "He wasn't with the rest of the Triumvirate, just him and his second at the New York Protectorate building. And she helped me in. I…I don't think she was happy about it, now that I remember. I just…she was taking orders."

"And who other than a member of the Triumvirate can give orders like that?"

"The director?"

"Who also happens to be Alexandria," Harry pointed out.

Taylor fought hard to keep her eyes on the road. "What?"

"I met Director Costa-Brown when Coil first brought me over. Later, during the Leviathan fight, the monster knocked her into me. Her song was the same—Alexandria _is_ Director Costa-Brown. And Legend was about to say something that she was upset enough about that she had him killed."

"But…OH SHIT!"

Harry snapped his eyes forward just as the headlights of the RV flashed across a figure standing in the middle of the road. Taylor pulled the steering wheel hard to the right—not so much as to flip the RV, but definitely strong enough to send the vehicle skidding onto the shoulder. She screamed in alarm as she tried to regain enough control to get it back onto the road, but the momentum fought her powerfully enough that she wasn't able to keep the RV from skidding off the shoulder and into a drainage ditch that ran along the side of the road.

The RV didn't quite tip over, but it hung at a precarious enough angle that Harry did not feel safe at all. Behind them, he could hear the Bee, Tee and Peter all screaming in fear and outrage.

"What happened?" Paige called.

"Someone on the road," Harry answered. "Everyone okay?"

"Yes."

Harry nodded then looked to Taylor.

"Get some bugs, but stay inside." With that, he apparated to a point fifty feet above the road and cast the flying spell. The moment he materialized, he felt a bullet bounce off the runes around his temple—a perfect headshot fired an instant before he even materialized. He cast his most powerful _lumos_ and suddenly the barren, rolling hills of eastern Washington state were bathed in magical sunlight.

Under this light, he saw her. She was dressed like Carmen Santiago, with a fedora and overcoat to ward off the chill spring evening. She held a pistol in each hand and was already moving toward the RV.

Harry began casting stunners, but she danced around them. He tried a broad-area stunner, but she simply bounced away from the area. It didn't seem like she was moving with any special speed or strength, she just seemed to know where to be or not to be.

She fired a single shot at the exposed bottom of the RV, and almost instantly a flash of fire blasted the huge vehicle all the way onto its side when its propane tank exploded. Harry stared a moment, his mouth agape in disbelief, before a red band of rage colored his vision.

He summoned their attacker's clothing, all of it, at once, pouring all his rage and magic into one of the first spells he'd ever been able to perform wandlessly. She'd been running toward the front, guns ready, when his magic broke through whatever was guiding her and ripped her into the air right toward him. He watched under his witchlight as she flew up toward him, and then after he moved, watched as she flew by with a startled, terrified expression on her face when she began to fall. He heard her call out a word, but didn't care.

Instead, he quickly apparated back to the ground. "Taylor!" he screamed.

"I'm okay!" he heard her cry. "The explosion didn't make it into the cabin. We're all okay! What the hell happened?"

"Some lady with guns and a fucking fedora! I'm going to levitate the RV upright again, okay?"

"We're ready!"

He started to cast the spell when something hit him. It wasn't a bullet or anything like one of Ballistic's shots, because for one it was the size of a person, and two, he continued flying away. The blow was so powerful, and he was moving so fast, he couldn't even turn around to see what hit him.

The Simurgh's song roared in the back of his mind. Abruptly he felt hands grab his waist with crushing force before the whole world began to spin so quickly, so violently, that he threw up moments before slamming into the ground. He didn't even have a chance to catch his breath before a tremendous, impossible blow slammed him further into the ground, as if to drive him into his own grave. Again and again the blows came, so strong that without his runes he would have simply been pulped into a slurry.

There was no time to think; to react. There was only blow after blow, driving him deeper and deep into the ground so fast there was no rhythm, simply constant kinetic force. What freed him was not conscious though—it was accidental magic. A flash of magic apparated him back toward the tipped RV again, where the woman with the fedora was quickly taking his friends apart single-handedly.

Qiana was already down, both her babies screaming for her. Stephanie huddled by the rear wheel well, desperately cradling her son, while Taylor stood over an unmoving Paige with a swarm of insects between her and Fedora girl.

Harry conjured every vile, terrible insect his previous lives had ever encountered in his millennia of living, and Taylor didn't even look back before she seized control of them. The woman's eyes widened, again in surprise, before she spun on her heel and ran.

This time, Harry heard a faint whistle before the object from before slammed into him. He had a brief glimpse of a gray visor before he was once again flying through the air. This time, with an angry growl, he slammed both hands onto her visor and apparated them both.

They emerged together a hundred miles away, straight up.

Instantly the gray-clad woman pushed away, grasping at her throat while Harry quickly cast a bubble-head charm on himself. He watched, bemused, as she spun toward the nighttime earth and sped away, her flight power obviously unaffected by vacuum.

He apparated back to the planet's surface in time to see the Fedora woman scream under Taylor's onslaught. He arrived just in time to cast a shield over Taylor as the woman fired her weapons until both clicked empty. Once assured Taylor wasn't going to die, he burned a quick set of battlefield runes into the ground and charged them with every erg of magic he could.

The numbingly loud _gong_ of Alexandria slamming into the shield let him know how close he'd cut it. He looked up as a red wave of magic scintillated across the dome where the cape struck. He couldn't see any sign of Alexandria herself, though. She must have bounced off it entirely.

Fedora girl, however, was still within the dome.

"Taylor?"

"Shot, but not bad," she said.

"Yeah, right. Let me see."

He cast another _lumos_ and winced at the wound in her side.

"Not bad?" he muttered. "Shit, Taylor, this got you in the fucking lung! How are you even standing?"

Under the light, he saw the blood running from her lips where she'd been coughing. A second later he was healing her, summoning the bullet that was still in her body before repairing the damage.

The moment he was done, she pointed to Qiana. "I'll check our attacker, go see to Qiana, then Paige."

"Paige is still breathing!" Stephanie called. She'd knelt down beside their oldest member.

Harry nodded before he went to check Qiana.

"Mama! Wake up, mama!" That was Bee, Harry was sure, shaking her mother's shirt.

His stomach twisted viciously when he saw the hole in her chest.

"No," he whispered. He knelt down between the screaming, crying toddlers and checked Qiana's pulse. It was weak, but there. "Stephanie, take Bee and Tee, I need to heal her now!" he said urgently.

A second later, Stephanie was there with Peter in her arms, trying desperately to wrestle away the two other toddlers. Harry, meanwhile, pulled back Qiana's shirt and stared at the profusely bleeding bullet hole in the left center of her chest right in the dip of her considerable cleavage. He placed his hand directly on the wound and closed his eyes.

As had often happened before, it wasn't just him channeling the magic, but an aspect from his previous lives as well. Words echoed through his mind, taking his desire and shaping his magic until he felt the bullet pop out and the flesh heel. Moments later he felt Qiana stir.

"Why is your hand between my tits?" she asked tiredly.

"Cause that's where the bullet went," he said. "Shit, Qiana, we almost lost you."

He pulled back enough to help her sit up, before then pulling her in a hug. She stiffened only a second before she relaxed.

"Bitch shot me before I could even see where I was," she muttered into his shoulder.

"I know. Bee and Tee are safe, but scared."

He let her go before standing and helping her to her feet. Her girls ran toward her over the scrub of the desolate landscape they found themselves sin. With the clouds overhead, they had neither stars nor moon, just his magic, to light their way.

Another loud _gong_ made everyone jump—one again Alexandria bounced off.

He went to Paige. She didn't have a bullet wound, just a very large, painful looking lump on her head. He reached out to heal her when he saw Qiana's blood on his hands. Beside him, Stephanie hissed.

A quick spell made the blood flare in a burst of red flame before his hands were clean. Only then did he cast a quick spell that had Paige's eyes fluttering.

"Qiana!" she said, the moment she was awake. "Harry, Qiana, she's…"

"I'm here, Canary-bird," Qiana said. She joined them with both toddlers in her arms, clinging to her with tears in their eyes. "Harry fixed me up."

Paige sagged back to the ground, visibly relieved. "Thank God. What about Taylor?"

"Dealing with our unwanted guest," Harry muttered.

The ground under them trembled violently, throwing dust and rocks in the air. "Huh, feels like Alexandria just discovered the shield goes underground too."

"Alexandria?" Stephanie asked, eyes wide with fright. "How did she even get here?"

"Probably the same way Fedora-girl did," Paige said. "She was the one who kidnapped me after Leviathan. I'd just left the lair for a breath of fresh air."

They got Paige upright, and almost instantly she took one of the twins in her arms. Harry noticed how the girl reached out for her, as if she were already a second mother, and shook his head and just how good Paige was with kids. Only then did he walk to where Taylor stood over their attacker.

The woman lay insensate, her limbs sprawled awkwardly across the small tufts of stiff grass. Her face was swollen beyond recognizably, her fedora crumpled in the dirt a few feet away. On her, and in the air around her, buzzed hundreds if not thousands of insects.

Taylor stood looking down at the woman with a blank expression on her face.

"She's still alive," she said. "Heart's going strong—I think she's waiting for one of us to get close enough to attack. For now—pretty sure some of the insects you gave me are lethal. She'll be dead in a day unless she has access to a parahuman healer."

"If she dies, we all die."

The voice sounded feminine, but only in the same sense Darth Vader's voice was masculine. The absolute absence of any inflection, feeling or even humanity made it seem more machine than womanly.

They all turned to see Alexandria standing on the edge of Harry's shield.

"Probably should have thought of that before you sent her to kill us," Taylor said. Harry wanted to cheer—she sounded just as cold and strong as Alexandria.

"We did. If you continue unchecked, we all die," Alexandria said.

"Says who?" Harry asked. "I mean, really, says who? Who is telling you what to do? Who told you to kill Legend? Wasn't he your friend? How'd you get here? Different dimension, and yet here you are barely a day after we got here. You obviously have a way to track us. That means you have a way to track the Slaughterhouse 9, or Nilbog, or any of the other monsters. Yet, here you are trying to kill us, when you leave the real monsters alone. So who the fuck do you think you are, and who the fuck gave you the authority to do any of the shit you're doing, besides your lies and bullshit, Rebecca Costa-Brown?"

Alexandria didn't move, and with her visor up he couldn't see her expression, but he imagined he could feel her thrumming with anger. Assuming she got angry. Maybe she didn't—powers affected people oddly sometimes.

"You have no idea what I've done for humanity," she said. "Or what Contessa has done. If she dies, your condemning all of humanity, in all universes, to death."

 _Click_. Harry straightened as his entire thought process _shifted_ into lines of efficiency.

"You believe that," he said, surprised at the admission. "You believe you're on a higher mission. The question is who set you on that mission?"

"As an aside to that, you weren't expecting to have to come, were you?" Taylor asked. "You thought Carmen Sandiego there could handle it. You didn't show up until Harry handed her ass. She moved like a pre-cog, but she can't see Harry. Tattletale said the same thing—he and his power didn't make sense."

"Release her, or no one leaves here alive," Alexandria said coldly.

"Qiana, that bitch shot you in front of your girls," Taylor said. "You willing to burn her back?"

"Fuck yeah," Qiana said.

"So, I guess you need to decide just how important Carmen Sandiego is to you," Harry said. "I guess I could heal her. Maybe. Or we can let her die slowly from anaphylactic shock. Or Qiana can put her out of her misery. But as of this moment, you fucking, lying, hypocritical bitch, you don't have a say. Because you're not the boss, your just another fucking pawn. And we're tired of talking to you. Give us the boss, or your girlfriend dies."

"Go ahead," Alexandria said.

 _Bluffing. Read files on all of us, believes none of us are capable of cold-blooded murder._ Harry shook his head before he conjured a large axe, stepped around Taylor and with a single hard swing took a swing right at Countessa's head.

"Doctor!" Alexandria shouted, eyes suddenly wide open.

Mid-swing, Harry had to grunt with the effort to turn the axe head enough to hit dirt instead of skull. Taylor's bugs buzzed angrily around the woman, causing her to flinch even through her swelling.

Outside his shield, the air shimmered until he saw a long hallway appear out of nowhere. From his hallway stepped a rather ordinarily looking black woman in a white lab coat. She was not thin, but neither overweight. She wore her black hair heavily styled in curls around her neck, giving her an ageless quality.

"Hmm, you don't look like God," Harry said. "She's blonde. Do you have some super precognition that gives you all the right steps to insure the survival of humanity?"

"If you give Contessa back to us, we'll let you live," the newcomer said.

"I have a better idea," Harry said as he hefted his ax. "How 'bout we kill Countessa, kill you, and kill Alexandria?"

"Children, would you really condemn the whole of humanity to extinction?" the doctor said.

"Nope, we just don't think you're the ones qualified or even capable of saving it," Taylor said. "Nor do you have any type of authority to do so."

"We do what we must, that is our authority," the doctor said.

"Well, you suck, so you're fired," Harry said. He cast a detection spell at the portal the woman came through and whistled with admiration. "Bloody hell that's elegant."

"What?" Paige said.

"That portal. It's not technological, a cape made it. It can go anywhere, in any dimension. And I'm fairly certain I can copy it. You want to go home, right now?"

"There's nowhere you can go that we can't find you," Alexandria said.

Harry smiled before he cast a spell that made her light up with fluorescent, puke-green. "Guess what? Now there's nowhere you can go where everyone won't be able to see you. That's a punitive charm designed to mark criminals. You can't wash it off, you can't change your clothes to make it go away—its marked your soul for everyone to see how much you suck."

He cast the same on the doctor, then at the insect-bitten woman on the ground. "Now, there is no place you can go that _I_ can't find you. You leave us alone and let us save humanity, and you get to live. Get in our way, and you die."

Harry nodded to Taylor. Paige, seeing the motion, very quickly spoke to Stephanie and Qiana before all three went to gather their things from the over-turned RV.

"Can you really make the portal?" Taylor asked.

Harry shrugged. "Pretty sure. I couldn't tell you the math behind it, but I could feel it. That maybe why my portal was so hard. It was trying to breach dimensions that should have had a much stronger barrier between them. But if what I felt is true, the dimensional barriers in this universe aren't that strong. Probably weakened by all these trans-dimensional beasties running around."

"Coil, we're done." Countessa's voice was so raspy it sounded almost unintelligible.

Harry went perfectly still. "Why are you calling for Coil…happens to be Alexandria," Harry pointed out.

Taylor fought hard to keep her eyes on the road as they continued driving through the seemingly endless countryside. Behind them, Qiana, Stephanie, Paige and the kids were all sound asleep. "What?"

"I met Director Costa-Brown when Coil first brought me over," Harry continued. "Later, during the Leviathan fight, the monster knocked her into me. Her song was the same—Alexandria _is_ Director Costa-Brown. And Legend was about to say something that she was upset enough about that she had him killed."

"But…they were supposedly friends!"

"Exactly." Harry crossed his arms and nodded affirmatively to himself. "The whole thing is a lie. We're not the villains, they are. And somehow, we're going to prove it."

Taylor glanced at him—his slight frame, crossed arms and intent gleam in his eyes, and grinned. "We're going to win?"

"Fuck yeah."

~~Simurgh's Son~~

~~Simurgh's Son~~

"He beat us?"

Alexandria's face was hidden behind her mask, of course, but even if it weren't Coil doubted the expression would have been any more telling. The fact that she repeated the question, using the same exact intonation as the first time she asked, was the only indication at all that she found his results to be odd.

"They," Coil corrected, fully cognizant of his own failures to fulfill his assigned role in the opera that was Brockton Bay. "He provided the tools Skitter used to defeat Contessa. You he fought to a draw without ever actually attacking you. It was Contessa who asked me to stop the timeline. I should note she did so shortly before dying of anaphylactic shock."

Around the table, the Doctor who gave him his powers frowned intently, while Contessa simply sat with a blank expression.

"I told you it would not work. That we should not try. There is no path to defeat them, only to make them stronger."

The Doctor and Alexandria both stared at the most powerful pre-cog alive. Doctor cleared her throat. "Contessa, you're the one who insisted they needed to be in the Birdcage."

"Yes."

When she didn't elaborate, Alexandria released an agitated sigh before turning back to their 'guest'.

"What does your 'pet' think?" Alexandria demanded. Again, no intonation, though Coil imagined he could hear condemnation.

"So far, she has resisted the therapy, but is cooperating without in order to ensure her friend's survival. She has assured me there is a high probability that Coven will return to Brockton Bay within the week, if not sooner. With new members and the active support of many elements of the community, they will be stronger than before."

"What action have you taken?" the Doctor asked.

"I've recruited," Coil said. "However, they've demonstrated that direct conflict is problematic. I'm working with Accord to find other ways to leverage the situation."

"We will not help you any further," Alexandria noted coldly.

"Nor would I expect you to," Coil said smoothly. "The compensation for cleaning up your mess after the assassination was sufficient for me to restore my losses. And of course, the payment for today's services should be sufficient to fund my return to Brockton Bay. Now, if that is all, I expect the deposit will be made available within the hour. A door, if you please?"

Coil left Cauldron with an itch between his shoulder blades. If they were willing to kill Legend, he had no doubt he was expendable as well. Fortunately, no knife came, and he was able to return to his new base intact and unharmed.


	45. Interlude: Renegotiation

A/N: Chap 44 review responses are in my forums as normal. Warnings, now: This was a hard chapter to write. It may be hard for some to read. It has a scene of very intentional, calculated psychological torture with a touch of genuine body horror. Nothing on GoT's level, and I'm not a horror writer, so it may be I'm overblowing it. But be warned, and know the world would not end and you would not miss too many plot points if you choose to skip this chapter. I actually considered cutting it myself but for the impact it will have on coming chapters.

* * *

 **Interlude: Renegotiation**

They were looking for her.

She used the term 'they' in a broad sense, in that she knew the Protectorate was looking for her as an accessory to the murder of Legend. The E88 was looking for her because Kaiser still believed that Coven was behind the release of their identities. The Merchants were after her because of her role in the capture of Skidmark and Squealer, not to mention the loss of half their members because of Canary's Master-infused inspirational speech. That in and of itself wouldn't be so bad if the two villain capes hadn't escaped during Leviathan's attack.

All those were bad.

Coil being after her, though, scared Lisa in a way she'd never been scared before. Not even facing Leviathan scared her like Coil did, because she knew he had no intention of killing her immediately. No, he was going to drug her, lock her in a room, and turn her into a soulless computational device, just like he tried to do with Dinah.

If it came down to it, she was fully prepared to shoot herself in the head. Only…she wasn't sure that would be enough. Somehow, Coil always managed to get his way. The only time it didn't was when Harry was involved.

Lisa hadn't cried since her brother died, in what felt like a completely separate life. But when she saw what their enemies did to Coven, she cried. Her power told her with merciless clarity why Canary was in the Birdcage now. Why they went after her, especially. Taylor's power simply couldn't be duplicated, but their enemies feared whatever Legend was going to say so badly they killed him, using Taylor Hebert to do it. It was an efficient, heartless assassination that also effectively gutted Coven in the process. Lisa could not have planned it better herself.

"Alex, you awake there?"

Lisa forced a smile at her fellow shelter volunteer. The shelter knew her as Alexandra White, a name chosen because variants of Alexandria were the most popular girl names in the world.

The man who called her name stood eighteen inches taller than her and literally twice as wide, and completely filled the frame of the door to the small storage closet she'd claimed as her room. His parents named him George Washington when they arrived from Namibia in a wave of a hundred thousand people fleeing the horror of Moord Nag.

Lisa knew George's name was a source of ridicule when he was little, until he ceased to be little and no one in their right mind without power would tease him about it. Despite his size, though, she found him to be possibly the kindest, most altruistic human being she'd ever met. When a pair of Panthers tried to make an issue of her being in a shelter they'd claimed, George simply stood between her and them and crossed arms thicker than most men's thighs. He'd stayed with her since then, not asking anything of her. When she told the National Guard commander at the shelter she wanted to volunteer, George volunteered right along with her.

If she were not a cape, she'd be worried he had romantic feelings for her. The idea of romance with anyone disturbed her to no end explicitly because of her power. But in this case that power told her that he just genuinely liked protecting and helping people. She looked up now and forced a smile for his sake. She knew he liked when people smiled at him, and knew also that few had done so since Leviathan.

"Up and at 'em," she said. "Is it the Minami family again?"

George nodded.

He escorted her through the shelter, looking with alert eyes at all the threats that lived there. Because of E88 pressure on the surrounding neighborhoods, the shelter was overwhelmingly minority, a rough mix of blacks, Japanese immigrants and Latinos. The most numerous of the three were the Panthers, and they did not appreciate the lone white girl wondering around what they considered their territory.

It was outside of her normal _modus operandi_ , an area that she would ordinarily not have risked because of the very real racial hatred that the E88 engendered in all the other ethnicities in Brockton Bay. If the Panthers had become violent over the years, it was because the E88 left them little choice. When they looked at her, they didn't make any distinction between her or a member of the E88. Despite that, she was still safer in the shelter with known threats than out on the street where Coil was searching for her.

Thank God for George.

When they arrived in the shrinking Japanese section of the shelter, she could see Daichi Minami pacing quietly behind the invisible demarcation line that was all that kept the Panthers and the Japanese immigrants from open warfare. Daichi did not shout or openly express frustration or impatience despite a very hard situation. Even if she didn't know from her power, all it would take was a single conversation to know that Daichi would feel mortified if he ever lost his temper enough to make a public show of it.

Even now, surrounded by strangers who would as likely cut his throat as shake his hand, he bowed to her and greeted her in his native Japanese. Both his daughters spoke English fluently, but he was finding the mongrel language of America difficult. Unfortunately, his daughters were not there. Which, Lisa guessed, was the reason he wanted to speak to her again.

" _Thank you for coming, Alex,"_ he said _._ " _Has there been any word of my daughters? The lieutenant is not helpful."_

The National Guard lieutenant was a jackass of the highest order who wanted nothing more than to leave the broken city. While Lisa couldn't fault his desire to leave, his utter lack of compassion for the people under his care infuriated her.

" _I'm so sorry, I haven't."_ Lisa knew her Japanese was terrible—she spoke it as well as she did solely as a result of her power. However, she knew that she was missing many of the idioms and social cues.

" _Mrs. Yamamoto left to join her family,"_ Daichi pointed out.

Which was true. Lisa didn't have the heart to tell him it was because her family came checking the various shelters themselves, rather than waiting for the National Guard or the Federal Endbringer Management Agency to respond.

" _The Lieutenant said we should have power in a day or two,_ " Lisa said. _"Then you should be able to make calls. I'm sorry I don't have any more._ "

He bowed, upset but unwilling to express his fear and frustration to a stranger, especially the only stranger he could actually speak to. He thanked her profusely for her time before returning to his cot. At a glance she saw two more cots were empty—the Japanese section was half empty, while the Panther-held section looked as if more were arriving every day.

Even with George, Lisa just wasn't sure how safe she was remaining there. With her dyed hair cut short and some artfully applied make up, she didn't resemble Tattletale at all. But that didn't mean someone wouldn't find her, having been unmasked when Coil managed to get her convicted to the Birdcage.

" _What's wrong_?"

German. She glanced at George and forced a smile. He spoke several languages, including German. Her power informed her he was also picking up Japanese just from her conversations with Mr. Minami. Dark eyes stared down at her in concern.

" _I am afraid one of his daughters is dead,_ " she admitted, hoping to distract with the truth.

" _I had five sisters in Namibia. One spoke foolishly of Moord Nag, and so she killed them all before my parents and I fled. It is a hard thing to lose family."_

Lisa took his hand, more for her sake than his own. She triggered because her brother committed suicide. Yet here was solid, powerful George who lost most of his family to a monstrous cape, trying to cheer her up.

She opened her mouth to admit her thoughts about leaving when a shadow caught her attention near the administrative section of the shelter. Frowning, she tried to focus through the dim light. The lieutenant was trying to conserve the fuel for their generator and so only powered one out of every four of the lights across the wide, open floor lined with cots.

 _Ill-defined movement. No clear boundary._

 _Cape. Didn't enter through main entrance._

 _National Guardsmen aware. Don't care._

She glanced across the wide-open space of the shelter and saw the current leader of the panthers, a football player from Winslow High, laughing even as he looked at her. He glanced away quickly.

 _Panthers aware. Comfortable. One of their own._

One of their own.

"George, I need to leave," she said through a false smile. "I think they're about to make their move."

"I will stop them," he said simply.

"They have a cape. She'll kill you."

George was brave and selfless. But he'd watched his sisters get murdered by a cape. She could see him hesitate and took the opportunity his hesitation provided to start walking forward alone. She hoped that if she left him, her hunter would let him live. Her power did its best to disabuse her of that hope, but sometimes she could choose to ignore what her power told her.

The skin between her shoulder blades twitched incessantly as she ducked into the administrative office. The lieutenant was asleep in his office, while his sergeant was playing cards with a pair of Panther enforcers. All three looked up at her when she stepped past. She again forced a smile and waived as if it were the most ordinary thing in the world, then continued past to the supply closet she'd claimed as her bedroom.

Everything she owned was in a satchel—the clothes she'd stolen from the abandoned high rise just after the battle, her Glock, and a small stash of money. She closed the door and glanced around the room—her choice in staying there was two-fold. One, it was more secure than the floor of the shelter despite barely being wide enough for her to lay down on her cot. But more importantly, it held a large air vent because of the cleaning chemicals that were previously stored in it.

She pulled the grate out of the wall without effort—removing the screws was the first thing she'd done when she arrived. She had a string tied to the inside of the grate and pulled it with her when she climbed feet-first into the tight space. That allowed her to secure the vent into place.

It wasn't enough.

Shadow Stalker phased through the wall, clad head-to-toe in black Kevlar-reinforced armor, her face hidden behind a black hockey mask and a large black-hooded clock. Her military-issue black boots didn't make a sound as she solidified inside the cramped room.

Lisa went perfectly still, not daring to breathe as Shadow Stalker looked around the cramped space. She tilted her head and touched her ear. "What?" she asked aloud.

Then a low, throaty chuckle as she pointed a cross-bow that bore a broad-head steel bolt right at the grate.

"Gotta choice to make, bitch," the cape said. "Alive, mostly alive, or dead. I hope you choose mostly alive or dead. That'd be more fun."

 _Coil. Knew exactly where I was. Guiding her._

 _Chances of escape low. Vent internal, lets out near front. Can anticipate any potential escape route. A flip of the coin, it will always be what he wants._

She dropped her head, trying not to moan.

"Dead," she called finally.

"Yeah, not the answer Coil's paying me for."

Shadow Stalker ripped the vent away, reached in and grabbed Lisa by her shirt and pulled. She tried to stop herself by placing her hands on either side of the vent, but Shadow Stalker leveraged her feet against the wall and pulled hard enough that it ripped Lisa's shirt even as she flew out of the vent and slammed into the opposite wall with a cry of pain.

She didn't have time to pick herself up before a boot toe slammed into her gut. She struggled desperately to breathe, and with that first breathe came a surge of vomit from the pain of it.

A gloved hand grabbed her hair and slammed her face hard into the tiled floor right where she was sick, then did so again. Lisa's ears were ringing and all she could see were bright flashes of white light. All other data and sensory input was lost in a wash of pain.

That's why she didn't immediately hear the door kicked in, or the angry shout. When the ringing in her ears faded enough, and the worst of the lights dulled, she could a brief glimpse of Shadow Stalker fading through George Washington and kicking the back of his knee.

As the giant toppled, Shadow Stalker raised the crossbow to the back of his head. Every movement of her body screamed to Lisa that she was about to see her friend die.

"Stop, please!" she gasped. "Ill go. Please. "Don't hurt him."

"Bitch, you don't understand," Shadow Stalker said. "You never had a choice."

She pulled the lever of her crossbow. Lisa's power told her with terrible, excruciating detail what happened next.

 _Compound crossbow. Bolt released at 375 feet per second._

 _Carries 31 foot-lbs of kinetic energy. Steel-tipped broad head arrow._

 _Strikes occipital bone of skull._

 _Steel tip collapses, unable to penetrate._

 _George is a cape. Brute 1, bones only. Soft tissue still susceptible to injury. Concussion at best._

George flopped boneless to the floor. The blunted arrow fell to the floor beside him in a pool of blood from where the tip cut his skin.

"Huh, what'ya know," Shadow Stalker said, as if instead of attempting to murder a man she'd just read an interesting article in the news.

Still, with George out, she ignored the unconscious giant, stepped across the small room, and slapped a PRT-issue restraining caller around Lisa's neck. When she yanked viciously on the collar, Lisa had no choice but to follow or choke. Once on her feet, she found herself spun around and slammed into the wall while both her arms were twisted behind her back and secured with a PRT-issued zip-tie.

The hall was filled with Panthers, two of whom wore National Guard uniforms.

"Yo, Stalker, we get to play?" one of them called. He was staring hungrily at Lisa's torn shirt and the exposed fabric of her bra.

"Only if she doesn't cooperate," Shadow Stalker said. She yanked Lisa's collar harder. "Hear that, bitch? You don't cooperate, I throw you to the dogs. There's no Grue or Skitter here to save your ass."

Lisa didn't say anything, but her silence only got her face slammed into a wall.

"Bitch, I asked you a question. You hear me?"

"I hear you," Lisa muttered around her swollen lips and at least one broken tooth.

"Why don't we just take the bitch?" another of the Panthers said.

Shadow Stalker's laugh sounded like an invitation.

"Go for it. The boss is going to make sure we got guns, food and equipment to start hitting the E88 back. You take away his pet? You break her? He's going to give those guns to the E88 to hit us. He doesn't give a shit either way. You wanted power. You wanted a cape to lead you. So I'm fucking leading you. Hands off the bitch until _I_ say so. Got it?"

The initial speaker held up both hands. "Yeah, I got it. What about the chinks?"

"Payment on delivery," Shadow said, shaking Lisa for emphasis. "Once we get our supplies, run 'em out or shoot 'em. Don't care. This is our territory, and soon everyone's going to know it."

That got a cheer out of the surrounding men and women who lined the hall while Shadow Stalker pulled Lisa out. The sunlight was shocking after almost a week inside a shelter, blinding her bloodshot eyes. She stumbled and Stalker intentionally let go so she fell forward, hands still tied behind her back. She tried to hold her head up out of the foul-smelling mud that she fell into, but was only partially successful. The impact caused a white-hot shard of pain to lance through her shoulder while her head throbbed with the worst headache she'd ever experienced.

Gloved hands lifted her out of the muck and dragged her to a waiting Humvee. The men manning it wore PRT uniforms, but she recognized the driver.

Dmitri grinned at her, showing a couple of gaps in his teeth from when Genesis knocked him out.

"So here is the little birdy, come to roost," he said happily. "Know this, little birdy. If you say anything, I'm going to shoot you in the knee."

"Where's my payment?" Shadow Stalker demanded.

"Other side, already unloaded," Dmitri said as a pair of uniformed mercenaries picked Lisa up and physically tossed her like a sack of potatoes into the back of the vehicle. "Keep up the pressure on E88, keep what you take, and he'll supply more. Much more."

They drove off, and Lisa was able to twist her head just enough to see Shadow Stalker and a pair of her people approaching four large crates set in the mud on the other side of the shattered road. Before she could see any more, a heavy black cloth was wrapped securely around her head. She fought hard not to cry when a rough hand reached through the rent of her shirt and grabbed the cup of her bra.

"No," Dimitri called from the front. "We're not being paid to be savages. You only get to play with her if boss says."

"Yes sir," Lisa's most recent tormentor said. He sounded southern—Georgia or Missouri.

Lisa couldn't see where they were going, but she knew where they started and was able to sense their turns. Left turn, right. Two minutes straight, left turn. One minute, right turn. Four minutes straight. Another right. Three minutes straight. Bumpy roads, the sounds of splashing water and construction.

They slowed. The air cooled—they were inside. However, the vehicle continued on for another two minutes at low speed. Speedbumps, one, two, three. The sound of heavy machinery, followed by a lurch in her stomach. They were on an elevator going down, one large enough to carry the whole vehicle.

The elevator stopped and Dimitri drove them further. The engine echoed off metallic walls within an enclosed space, accompanied by the sounds of machinery and movement. Rough hands pulled her out of the vehicle and carried her painfully by her arms, making her shoulder hurt even worse.

Another elevator, more long hallways. Suddenly rough hands gripped her and she felt something cold and metallic snip away at her shirt. She tried to struggle with a terrified squeal, but stopped when the restraining collar sent a brief but agonizing surge of electricity into her neck. She screamed and went boneless, but the hands refused to let her fall and in seconds the scissors were back, methodically cutting away everything until she was completely nude, save the collar. Then, and only then, did they remove her blindfold.

She had a chance to see a brightly lit shower stall a second before a jet of freezing cold water slapped her in the face. She sputtered and coughed against the jet, unable to do anything but try to shield her body against it. The water felt like a hand slapping her bare flesh. She had to keep her eyes closed against it, and so didn't see the color of gritty powder her captors threw onto her—a disinfecting agent and a caustic soap from the smell. Gloved hands roughly rubbed the power into her skin and hair, only for the freezing jets of water to wash it out.

Her power stuttered at the wall of painful stimuli and the sheer dehumanization of her treatment. Finally, the water ended. She slid down a tiled wall and risked opening her eyes. Tears flowed down her cheeks, lost in the droplets of water from her hair.

Coil stood in the frame of the shower. Four men stood behind him, all with latex gloves on. They were staring at her nude body with blank expressions.

 _Power play. Wishes to humiliate and diminish. Strip away dignity and pride. Portray strength to weakness. Standard hard interrogation techniques._

Her power fed her information that would have been obvious to a child, and yet it did nothing to help the feeling of utter dejection that dominated her consciousness.

"Hello, Tattletale," Coil said. He sounded…happy. The son of a bitch sounded like he'd just won a round of bingo. "It hurt my feelings when you decided you'd rather die than work for me again. Quite rude."

Lisa pulled her legs to her chest and tried her best to cover herself. She knew it was pointless and further portrayed the feeling of helplessness. It didn't stop her in the least.

"So, I believe it is high time we renegotiate your contract," Coil said. "Gentlemen?"

The four mercenaries pounced on her, gripping her arms and legs to lift her horizontal to the floor, spread eagled. She cried, kicked and struggled, but any one of them by themselves was bigger and stronger than her. All four left her no chance to escape despite her screams and futile efforts to kick or twist free.

The halls were featureless gray, almost as if they were in a naval ship of some kind, except there was no motion at all and they were under ground. They passed through a glass wall, and the lighting suddenly grew exponentially brighter. She kicked harder until the hands pushed her down against a steel table. The mercenaries pushed her arms down until metal braces clasped against her wrists and forearms, angles and thighs, leaving her locked in a spread-eagled position.

"Wow, she's pretty hot."

Lisa's eyes bulged as she stared at the speaker. She saw a man of middle height with black, tightly curled hair and a face of… _mask. Organic mask._ It made him look like a living, breathing surgical mask.

"No!" she shouted. "Fuck, Coil, no! I'll do whatever you want, just please keep that fucker away from me!" She screamed.

"Dear, unfortunately you forfeited your negotiating position when you betrayed me," Coil said. "As it happens, I do have an important use for you, and I fully intent to use your abilities. But first, my friend Blasto needs to make a small alteration."

The villain Blasto—an organic tinker who had the potential to be worse than Bonesaw with the Slaughterhouse Nine—stuck a hand-rolled cigarette into his mouth and took a long pull of pot. He walked around to stand directly over her and offered it to her.

"Wanna toke? It'll help, trust me."

She shook her head, not even bothering to fight her tears. "Please," she begged. "Please don't."

"Hey, it won't hurt that bad," he said, as if talking to a child about their vaccination shot. "I'll even numb you up."

Metal braces clamped around her head, immobilizing her completely. She felt a sharp needle in the back of her skull, followed by what felt like cold water creeping over her scalp. When the drill started, she screamed, only to suddenly lose control of her own mouth.

"Shush, babe, it'll be over soon," Blasto told her. He hummed to himself, pausing twice to pull on his joint, before he finished whatever he was doing to her skull. She could feel hot blood dribbling down her scalp through the roots of her dyed hair.

Rather than continue staring at her naked body, Blasto stepped away from her scalp and threw a light blanket over her. He then stepped back as Coil took his place beside her table.

"So, now we come to the heart of the negation," Coil told her. "You have an organic bomb in your skull. Inspired by Bakuda, I'll have you know. It is quantum-locked to the electrical impulses of my brain. If I die, you will die. Of course, I could also kill you with a manual switch that I have given to one of my people. They don't even know what it's for, only that on my orders, or in the event of my incapacitation, they are to activate it."

She stared at him, struggling to accept what he was telling her.

Her power surged through the waves of pain from her abuse and torture. _Scared. Needs insurance. Leverage against a foe he can't fight._

 _Targeted her specifically. Someone she knows. Someone coming. Someone…_

"Holy shit, they escaped," she breathed.

Coil's featureless mask crinkled, and she knew without a doubt he was frowning.

"Indeed. I've accepted that a physical altercation with them will be problematic. However, we all have our roles in life. My role is to rule Brockton Bay. And your role is to act as the shield against your former friends to ensure I can do just that. In the meantime, you will continue to use your power to my benefit. If you fail, I will hurt you. If you work against me, I will allow others to hurt you far, far more. I know what your worst fear is, Sarah Livsey. Give me reason, and I will ensure that every member of Shadow Stalker's new gang forces you to experience that fear, over and over again, until you are nothing but a piece of bloodied meat. Do you understand me?"

There were so many things she wanted to say. All that came out was a weak "Yes."


	46. Ascension 1

A/N: Chapter 45 review responses in my forums like normal. Just as a reminder to the many, many people who seemed to lose track of where Lisa was, she _never got back to Coven._ I have more in my review responses.

And now, the beginning of Coven's ascension.

* * *

 **Ascension 6.1**

With a grunt at the effort, Harry stumbled back from the black stone arc inscribed with runes and imbued with all their blood. Just like the portal he made from within the Birdcage, he didn't display any outward sign of power. The only thing that made Taylor think the portal worked was the odd shimmering curtain of translucence that dropped down within the arch itself.

"I don't want to alert anyone, but the police are getting closer," Stephanie noted.

She was cradling her son Peter in her right arm, and over her left she carried a large duffel bag. Taylor carried two.

Qiana held Tee in her arm like Peter, with an identical bag over her left shoulder. Paige mirrored her, holding Bea in her left arm and a bag over her right. Harry, trembling from the effort of making the portals, struggled to pick up just one duffel.

"Well, it's not like we just robbed every major store in Portsmouth," Qiana said. "Hot damn that was fun, too."

All of them realized they were going back to a shattered city. The chaos following Endbringer attacks was well known. The Federal Endbringer Management Agency did so badly at Seattle that the director at the time had to resign, and the Madison attack was even worse. FEMA turned into a spiteful, bitter joke.

So, given their roles as villains, and the fact that the Earth they were on apparently did not have capes or Endbringers, but did have good insurance policies, they decided to go on a prolonged supply run through the entire city of Portsmouth, with Harry using his magic to create dimensional pockets in their bags, and then to suck the wares of entire stores into them, while Qiana and Taylor stood guard and fought back the confused, terrified local police. They teleported on to the next store, each time leaving behind police who were convinced they had the villains trapped.

They managed to rob a sports supply company, a major grocery store, two pharmacies and the planet's version of an Big Buy. They carried the results of their predations all in six impossible duffel bags. Taylor hated to admit it, since she knew damn well that they were committing serious crimes, but the whole thing was a blast. They managed to get through without hurting a single person.

Now, though, it was time to go home. She forcibly pushed back all the bugs she could feel, nodded to Harry, and then stepped through. She had to duck under the low arch.

Physically it was like walking into a pressurized room. Her ears popped and beads of sweat gathered on her skin because of the more humid air. The stench of rot hung heavily in her nostrils, but otherwise there was no effect in travelling from one world to another. She instantly reached out as far as she could and felt hundreds of thousands of insects responding instantly to her power.

Paige came through next.

"What was that, Pag?" Bee asked. "Why it smell bad, Pag? Where mama go, Pag?"

Paige smiled adoringly at the little girl, who squirmed in her arms in a desperate attempt to see everything at once. Taylor, though, was too busy scouting out the area to pay too much attention. She could see they were in the Docks, a quarter mile north of where the Boardwalk should have begun.

The area looked devastated. Every structure there was heavily damaged by Leviathan's surge, their steel frames twisted by the pressured tsunami. Roads were at best cracked, if not washed away entirely. Taylor turned and saw the spot where she thought the Dockworker's Association should have been, but found nothing but rubble with a large sailing boat's hull sticking out as if thrown like a child's toy. Rotting fish and small animals littered the mud, though she was grateful she couldn't see any bodies.

Qiana came with Tee, then Stephanie with Peter. Finally, Harry stumbled through just in time for the portal to shimmer and blink out of existence. "You know, I keep thinking there's got to be an easier way to do that," he groaned.

"Stop bitching," Qiana said lightly. "You think making those rocks was easy? Where are we, Tay? This is your turf, right?"

Taylor's power detected a huge concentration of insects. Among the million or so there, she felt a dozen Darwin Bark spiders. They'd done well while they were away.

"That way," she said with certainty. "Not even half a mile."

They began slogging through the mud. The sky overhead glowered with clouds illuminated only by a hidden, late afternoon sun. Taylor thanked Canary's foresight in suggesting they all pull on hiking boots from the looted sports store, because she would have hated slogging through the mud otherwise.

Harry forced himself to catch up. He gasped for breath as he did so.

"Soon as its safe, you're going to start running with me," she told him.

"Yes, mom," he muttered. "Can you tell if everything's still standing?"

"The Terrarium is," she said. "I've already set the bugs to start cleaning up a little. All I can feel in the lair is walls. You warded it to keep the bugs out."

"Which I thanked him for with a very nice chocolate cake," Canary said. "Sorry, Taylor, but I'm not sleeping in a building with your bugs."

"It was a good cake," Harry said with a grin.

They had to go slow to make sure the babies were safe. There were few flat surfaces—instead it was a constant stream of rubble, some piled up well over their heads. Most disconcerting where the ship hulls, most from the graveyard, that had been blasted by Leviathan onto the ground.

"It's been over a week and it doesn't look like anyone has done shit," Taylor muttered. "Why aren't crews out here trying to clear some of this stuff away?"

No one had any answers, so they just kept moving as best they could.

Several times Harry just transfigured the rubble into plain wooden steps to walk over. His magic grew stronger the longer he had to recover from making the portal, which was good because Taylor wasn't sure they'd have made it over some of the piles without it.

They saw their first Merchant's tag halfway there.

The M with teeth painted over it appeared on a wooden plank staked into the mud in a spot Taylor was sure once held an abandoned factory she and Emma used to explore when they were in Middle School.

"Local gang?" Qiana asked.

"Merchants," Taylor explained. "Dealers and pimps. Two low ranked capes—Skidmark and Squealer. She's a tinker."

"With huge…" Harry stopped when Taylor glared. "Cars. And trucks. And…you know… stuff."

"She was well endowed," Paige helpfully dug him out of the pit. "We signed a contract with the local companies to protect the area and captured them, but they must have escaped when Leviathan hit."

"Protection racket?" Stephanie looked upset at the idea.

Taylor shrugged. "My dad was an exec in the local union. It wasn't a racket, the companies proposed it, we drew up a contract, and signed it. More like we were mercenaries or police-for-hire."

"Oh." Stephanie nodded, a relieved smile playing about her lips. "That's kind of cool."

Taylor grinned back, until abruptly her expression changed. "Fuck."

Harry tensed. "What?"

She could feel trucks surrounding the building. Why hadn't she felt them before? _Because I was worried about cleaning up my damned terrarium._

"Ten big trucks surrounding the lair," she said. "Fifty-two men in armor. Can't tell if there are any capes there."

"Sounds like lunch to me," Harry said.

Taylor stared. "God you're a dork."

He made a kissy-face at her. "Okay, who wants to go fuck with some PRT dickheads?"

Qiana handed her baby to Canary. "Oh fuck yeah."

"Stephanie?" Taylor asked.

The young woman tensed, her eyes widening in terror.

Harry, in an unusual fit of understanding, saved her. "Not until she has armor."

 _Makes sense._ "Right. So, us three. You up for this after the portal?"

"Already feeling good. So, what's the plan?"

"I delay the far side with the bugs while we take the nearside, then we hit the opposite side," Taylor said.

"Damn you're sexy when you get serious like that," Harry said.

Taylor fought against the heat of her cheeks, because despite all the lingering uncertainty of letting him in, she knew he wasn't joking at all. It was terrifying and exhilarating and wonderful beyond description that anyone found her sexy.

"You and Qiana go," she said. "I can attack from here and make my way on foot."

The sky over the lair darkened as a swarm rose like a biblical plague.

"Sexy," Harry added with a wink, "and scary as shit. You ready, Smolder?"

Qiana grinned. "Fuck yeah. Let's do this thing."

He took her hand, and a second later they were in the midst of scrambling terrified PRT agents. Taylor looked back at her two worried friends and the three children they held.

"Should be safe to come in a few seconds. I'll let you know."

"Be careful," Paige said.

The sound of men screaming was Taylor's response. She grinned at them before scrambling over the pile of debris to reach a cleared stretch of land where the PRT had set up their blockade. Even as she walked toward them, she was directing her swarms, both the bugs she found free and the huge population she'd cultivated in her terrarium before their capture.

On the far side of the lair, she had the bugs swarming men's faces and filling their vans to keep them from getting away. In the front she was coordinating with Qiana's walls of burning ash which the powerful cape tossed out like hot battering rams against anyone who got to close, or didn't move away fast enough. Harry bounced around striking with lightning-quick attacks. Fourteen men were down before Taylor even reached the perimeter.

Harry teleported so quickly it seemed almost as if he blurred from one spot to another in a shining white cloud at times. The only time she saw him materialize fully was when he lashed out with red light toward another target. Each strike put a man down, but each victim continued breathing so she knew he wasn't killing anyone.

Her steps faltered when she felt newcomers rushing from the back door of the lair. Over the continuing screams of the men she was assaulting, she could hear through her swarms new sounds—the shouts and yells of men who were not scared or hurting, but angry. She made sure to tag them, but waited until she confirmed who the newcomers were before she did anything. In seconds, she knew. They slammed into the overwhelmed PRT agents and put them down.

By the time Harry and Qiana took out the last PRT agent in front, those in the back were already down.

"Harry, got company," she warned him.

The door to the lair opened and her father walked out.

She stood frozen for the longest time, staring at this tall, gaunt-faced man in the worn clothes who stared right back at her with red-rimmed eyes and a gaping mouth. He began walking toward her, stiff-legged as if he were furious. She simply stood frozen in place, not sure what to do or say, until suddenly his stiff gait turned into a stumbling run and he was _there_ , sobbing like a baby and holding her in his arms. He smelled of sweat and stale beer and it was the best smell she could remember because it was _him_.

"Oh my baby girl!" he sobbed. "Oh God, you're really here! You're here! I'm so sorry I couldn't…I…" The blubbering continued, and it was this which broke through the icy haze of shock and let her hug him back just as fiercely. She was home.

Finally, he pulled back, holding her by her shoulders and simply staring at her.

"You've lost weight," she noted.

"So have you," he said. He sounded worried. "Taylor, what…"

"Danny, we need to get inside."

He turned to see Paige vary carefully climbing over the debris pile that surrounded the lair. He noted the two toddlers she was very gingerly trying to handle, and watched as Harry and Qiana appeared with a pop so the mother could take one.

"Thanks, Canary-bird!" Qiana said said as she took Bea.

"Mama, who that?" Bee asked, pointing at Danny.

"Introductions later," Harry said. "Mr. Hebert, great to see you, sir. How many guys do we have?"

"About forty of us are still here," Taylor's dad said.

"Think they'll help us steal the PRT's stuff?" Harry asked.

"Oh, hell yes," Danny said. "We owe them for what the bastards did." He stepped away from Taylor, cupped his hands and shouted, "Phil, strip the men and steal their trucks!"

"On it!"

Danny turned back to Taylor, a happy, sloppy grin on his face. He looked at Harry, still grinning, then back to Taylor. The grin seemed to fade a little as he stared at them.

Harry looked to Taylor with a worried expression. "What, do dads just fucking know?"

"You didn't…" Danny began.

Qiana guffawed. She didn't laugh or chortle or chuckle. It was a full-bellied burst of laughter.

"Oh hell yes they did!"

Danny's eyes narrowed at Harry. "Did you use protection?"

They killed an Endbringer. Taylor unwillingly murdered a member of the Triumvirate. She went to a dimensionally locked, inescapable prison and yet was one of the first and only people to ever escape it, and her father wanted to know if she was using a condom with her boyfriend?

"I hate my life," she said aloud.

~~Simurgh's Son~~

~~Simurgh's Son~~

It took only minutes for the men and women of the DWA who remained in their lair to drive the PRT vans into the wide, open floor of the lair. It took longer to secure the agents and strip them of their armor, uniforms and weapons. When that was done, men and women clad only in their underwear were forced to sit in a corner near the freight entrance of the lair secured with their own zip-ties under the watchful guard of the vengeful Dockworkers.

It took only a few more minutes after that for Harry to realize who _wasn't_ there. No Dinah. No Lisa. Only a guilty, furious-looking Jess Haskins. The only other people in the building were normal DWA workers led by Phil Lendy and Taylor's dad. Phil, Harry remembered, was the one who signed their contract for the DWA as the president of the association.

Phil Lendy was the one who explained everything that happened, while the rest of Coven sat and listened in furious silence. He had a heftier build than Danny, with gray-dusted blonde hair and a week's worth of whiskers he was trying with limited success to parse into a beard.

"…and that was that," he finished. "We chose to stay, PRT put up a line so that anyone who left got arrested, and we've been hunkered down praying and hoping since."

"Because Dinah said we'd be back," Taylor clarified.

The three DWA men—Phil, Danny and his friend Kurt—all nodded.

Harry watched Taylor the entire time, so attuned to every bit of her that he could watch as if it were on a graph how her emotions surged. Fury about Dinah's loss, worry that Lisa never came back. Pride that her father and his colleagues had chosen to help them despite being labelled as villains.

He had to look away when that nagging, hollow but wonderful feeling in his chest got too strong. Instead, he found himself looking at Phil Lendy. The other man glanced from Harry to Taylor before grinning faintly.

"So, we got minions, then?" Harry blurted. "I mean, right?"

Phil laughed, while Danny shook his head. Kurt just shrugged. "Better than Uber and Leet."

"So what do we do next?" Canary asked.

"First thing is get Qiana, Stephanie and the kids set up here," Harry said. "They need a room and they're stuff sorted. I can expand their rooms."

"Next is to find where our people are," Taylor said. "Dinah, Aisha and Lisa."

"And Vista, if she wants to come," Harry added.

"Right. And Vista."

"What about all the PRT guys?" Kurt asked.

"Eh, we wait for a shift change and send them home," Harry said with a shrug. "Not going to hurt the grunts who think they're doing the right thing."

"Then what?" Danny asked.

Harry looked and saw Taylor meeting his gaze squarely.

"Then we fight back," Taylor said with her cold death-glare of rage.

"And use protection," Harry added, grinning like the besotted sod he was. He figured it was good to have balance to Taylor's death-rage.

~~Simurgh's Son~~

~~Simurgh's Son~~

Harry was frankly expecting the entirety of the Protectorate to pounce on their lair the moment they got back. That's why he was surprised when the various PRT agents had to continue sitting on their asses, excepting escorted bathroom breaks and a little watering, for almost four hours before the Protectorate finally showed up.

On a motorcycle. By herself.

Miss Militia brought the obviously tinker-made bike to a halt just a few feet from the wardline of the lair and looked around her attentively. Her gaze lingered on the hull of a rusted-out tanker that was thrown onto its side by Leviathan's surge before she finally turned to stare at the door of the lair.

"She's kinda hot," Harry noted.

Taylor was about to berate him when her father said, "You're not joking."

"Dad!"

Danny shrugged. "Taylor, I'm not blind or dead. She's a very attractive woman. Doesn't take away the fact she could kick my ass. That's all I'm saying."

They stood just inside the pedestrian door of the lair, looking through a one-way window. The Protectorate cape stood calmly, a black and green blur of light shimmering on her right hip. As he watched, it became a bowie knife, then a pistol, then a machete, switching through various weapons without any pattern he could detect.

"So, should we pretend we're not here?" Harry asked.

"Fuck that," Taylor said. "We're not even going to let them pretend they won."

"Right. Let's go, then."

The two stepped out of the Lair with Danny and Phil Lendy a step behind. As they approached, Harry waived.

"Heya, Miss Milita. How's Vista doing?"

The weirdest thing was her utter lack of surprise. Harry had to admit he was a little disappointed. "Mage," she said with a nod. "Skitter. And Mr. Hebert and Mr. Lendy."

"Miss Militia," Danny said with a nod.

They stood in silence for a moment before the hero spoke. "Are my men alive?"

"Sure," Harry said. "Inside, tied up. We're going to keep the weapons, armor and trucks, just so you know. But you can have the agents back any time."

She _sighed_. Not yelling or threatening, she just sighed.

"Mage, honestly, what do you need with ten PRT transports?"

"To transport stuff, what else?" Harry said. "We gotta have vehicles to get around to the people who need the supplies we have. Phil says your supply columns are all getting stolen and that people are hungry. So, since the so-called heroes can't take care of our people, we will."

"The PRT is short on materiel," she said. Only as she spoke did Harry see the dark rings under her eyes. The cape supposedly didn't need to sleep, but she looked exhausted. "We need those trucks back."

"Obviously not, since they were sitting around here," Taylor noted.

"It was a shift change; they were supposed to be back at headquarters hours ago." The blur at her side turned into a scythe before reverting back to a bowie knife. "How much for the trucks? We have money, even if we can't use it to get what we need."

Taylor took Harry's hand. He glanced at her and saw the _look_.

"We don't need money right now," Taylor said. "We need information. Three of our people are gone—Dinah Alcott was _ours._ We didn't kidnap her, she joined Coven of her own will. Aisha Laborn is gone too—she's a Stranger who left with Dinah to protect her. And Tattletale. Where are they? Good answers get things back. Bad answers don't."

Dark eyes narrowed in frustration. "You're blackmailing me."

"Oh no," Taylor said. Her voice trembled with rage. "No, we're going to blackmail the fuck out of Alexandria and Prism for their roles in murdering Legend. _That's_ blackmail. This…this is ransom."

The surge of energy at Miss Militia's side turned briefly into an RPG before revering to a pistol which she quickly holstered. "Be very, very careful about the accusations you throw around, Skitter."

"Or what?" Harry demanded. "They'll put out a kill order? Throw us in the Birdcage? There's nothing left you have to threaten us with. We know how bad the corruption is. We know who the real villains are. And if the PRT doesn't play, everyone else in the world will too."

"Where are our people?" Taylor demanded.

Militia crossed her arms over her chest and simply stared, her eyes still ringed and tired, but no longer crinkled with anger. Instead, her face was utterly indecipherable. _Good poker face,_ Harry though, deciding then and there never to play strip poker with her. The jackpot would have been awesome, but the odds would have been stacked against him.

"The Alcott family was killed en route to their summer home in Martha's Vineyard," the hero finally said. "Dinah's body was not recovered, so we believe she's been abducted. From her own prediction to Armsmaster, it was…"

"Coil." Taylor snarled. Not only did she have the death-glare of rage, Harry could hear it in her voice.

"Yes. If your friend was with her, then likely she was abducted too."

"And Tattletale?"

Miss Militia shifted just the slightest bit.

"PRT headquarters took a statement from a witness in the 53rd Street shelter that a girl who might have been Tattletale was abducted by Shadow Stalker, who unfortunately escaped her detention center several days ago and has now formed her own race-based gang to counter the Empire 88."

Harry looked to Taylor. "Where's that?"

"Far side of Empire territory, mostly Panthers," Taylor said. She looked hard at Militia. "Coil's returned, then?"

"As far as we know," Militia admitted. "The fighting has become worse in the past two days. Empire, the ABB remnant, Merchants and now Panthers are scrambling for territory and we're having firefights daily. You're right, we've not been able to get supplies into the areas that need it most because of the fighting. Armsmaster believes something is orchestrating it."

"Yeah, that would be Coil, it's what he does," Harry muttered. "Mr. Hebert, what do…?"

"Danny, Harry, just Danny. And I believe her."

"Fine." Taylor glared and the terrarium behind them began to buzz with the sound of angry bugs. "You tell Armsmaster and Piggot and all the other lying, murdering, hypocritical shits in the PRT that we're back, and we're done playing your stupid fucking games. We tried to play by the rules and you fucking stabbed us in the back. You fucking violated the Endbringer Truce. Next time you try to interfere with our people, gloves are off."

"That goes both ways, young lady," Militia said.

"Difference is, we're more powerful than you are," Harry said simply. "You captured us through betrayal and lies. Let Alexandria come. Call her, and tell I said so. I'll let the world know who she is with that mask off. I'll let the world know just what role she played in murdering the only decent human being in the whole of the Protectorate."

"Besides you," Taylor added. "Which will make it a shame if I have to swarm you with a million cockroaches and leave nothing but bones." She turned and walked away. "Dad, Mr. Lendy, we agreed on the agents and eight trucks?"

"Sounds right," Phil said, while Danny nodded and the three started heading back.

Harry lingered long enough to grin at Militia. "You'll have to forgive her. She's just a bit upset about how you assholes tortured Canary into compelling her to murder Legend. Stuff like that makes her cranky. Ta-ta!"

He teleported with a pop, leaving a stunned Militia to stand alone in the mud outside their lair.


	47. Ascension 2

A/N: Chap 46 review responses are in my forums. And I'd like to say something-lot's of folks are looking forward to Coven going all out medieval on everyone from the PRT and Protectorate to Coil. I hope this chapter, though, illustrates just who and what Coven has _chosen_ to be.

* * *

 **Ascension 6.2**

The further in from the coast they drove in their stolen PRT van, the less damage they found. What this meant was instead of huge piles of obliterated rubble and rusted ship hulls scattered about like toys, they found hollowed out buildings where flooding had done damage, but not on the scale like the Docks and the Boardwalk saw.

A glance at a map was enough to show Harry that 53rd Street ran from downtown all the way west to I95 in four lanes that served as one of the primary arteries into and out of the city. The neighborhoods closest to the road belonged to the people who couldn't afford to make it to the suburbs, Captain's Hill or the beach front neighborhoods.

Taylor found it oddly fitting that of all those neighborhoods, the west 53rd Street area seemed to have done the best. They didn't have any power and the streets were rutted out from the scouring water that swept almost five miles inland, but the dirty water lines on the building walls only came to their eyes, and didn't appear to have had the sheer blasting power they saw closer to the sea.

They also saw people, most with masks and gloves pulling the sodden, ruined artifacts of their lives out of their ruined homes. The people around them eyed the PRT van with expressions that ranged from hopeful to hateful.

"You girls okay back there?" Danny called.

"Yes, we girls are just fine, thank you," Harry called back.

Qiana just laughed.

Danny wore a mostly fitted set of PRT tactical gear—black jump pants, tac vest loaded with a bunch of stuff he couldn't name, and a pistol that he fired once before they left just to get a feel for it. He hadn't touched a weapon since his brief collegiate fling with Marquis shortly before the villain's capture. New Wave's capture of the villain was likely why Danny was alive, free and a father to this day.

Beside him, Kurt kept looking in the multiple pockets of his tac vest. "This is fuckin' cool, Danny-boy. Fuckin' cool. Should have been a minion years ago."

"Free wine," Harry chimed in from the back.

"Fuck yeah!" Kurt agreed.

"Heads up, I see the shelter," Danny called. "Er, it's plastered in Panther signs."

"You people got Panthers up here?" Qiana stuck her head through the window that separated the cab of the van from the carrier section. "Shit, I thought this was an Empire town."

"It is," Danny said. "Panthers usually kept their head down. Looks like they're done with that…what the hell?"

A man came flying out of the shelter doors to splash down into a water-filled pot-hole the size of a sauna. A moment later a veritable giant, near seven feet and 300 pounds at least, came stumbling out of the shelter with two smaller men around his neck and a third punching his stomach. For a man his size, he looked more muscular than rotund and proved it when he roared, reached behind him, and threw one of the men trying to choke him against the wall of the shelter.

Two more men followed, pistols in hand. And between them, strutting like a queen, came Shadow Stalker in her full gear, cross-bow in hand. Just as the giant was dealing with his second hanger-on, she raised her cross-bow and fired.

The broad head steal tip struck the giant's forearm, cutting the skin but not penetrating. It obviously hurt, though. The man didn't roar in rage, he cried out in pain and sounded disturbingly young to Danny.

"Guys, look at this!" Qiana said.

Taylor and Harry crowded around her to see out the window.

"Fuck," Taylor cursed. "That fucking…"

"What, you know her?" Qiana asked.

"That's the bitch that made Taylor trigger," Harry said.

"Well let's go fuck her up then," Qiana said, as if it should have been the most obvious thing in the world.

"A reasonable plan," Harry said with a grin.

The two gunmen were taking shots, but had terrible aim because they didn't want to get close enough to risk being grabbed. The giant was also smart enough to keep moving, and eventually took hold of the man who'd been pummeling his stomach and held him up like a shield.

All of them stopped when the overhanging cement that protected the front entrance of the shelter snapped off in a clean line and flipped down, blocking the door and the five or six more Panthers that had been heading out to join the fight.

Abruptly one of the two gunmen disappeared, replaced by a…

"What the fuck is that?" Qiana demanded.

"Velociraptor," Taylor answered coolly as she approached the combatants. "Harry likes dinosaurs."

"And it's so awesome!" Harry said. "I'm not Manton limited except with capes! I wasn't sure after I killed Lung, but look at that! I can transfigure minions!"

Shadow Stalker stood frozen in place, until finally she shook herself free of it.

"No fucking way!" she shouted. "You were in the fucking Birdcage!"

"Surprise!" Harry said, before blasting her with a lightening curse.

The transfigured gunman let out a screeching, bestial screech and charged the other gunman, who showed a great deal of situational awareness and wisdom by turning to run away as fast as he could, while the velociraptor followed right on his heels.

Shadow Stalker had collapsed into the mud, twitching and screaming from the curse. Taylor walked over to her and ripped off her mask. Even through her obvious pain, Sofia screamed.

"Bitch, you unmasked…"

Taylor's response was a strong right-hook to Sofia's chin. "Where's Tattletale?"

"Fuck you, bitch!"

"Harry, lightning, please."

"What? What the….ahhhh!"

The air cracked as lightning flashed from Harry's hand into Sofia's twitching form. The water around her steamed as her body twitched.

"You fucks!" she gasped, crying and still cursing. "You fucks, I'm going to fucking kill you all!"

Even Harry was shocked, and a little disturbed, when Taylor pulled her pistol and fired point blank into Sofia's knee.

The other girl stared, mouth a gape and glistening from spittle. She simply stared, until she finally took in a deep breath and screamed.

"You despised me because I was weak, didn't you, Sofia?" Taylor shouted over Sofia's screams. "Well look what you made me? Am I strong enough now? Where is Tattletale? You still have plenty of joints left."

It wasn't Taylor's normal death-rage glare. Harry started walking to her because, despite her volume, she simply sounded empty. In that moment, he knew Sofia Hess was about to die.

The giant reached Taylor before Harry did. The man didn't hit Taylor, or pick her up and throw her away. He simply placed one meaty hand over her gun hand.

"Are you no better than her?" His voice sounded oddly high pitched and gentle for such a huge man.

"Usually," Harry said from behind them. He wasn't about to admit how utterly relieved he was with the interruption. "I guess Shadow Stalker just brings out the worst in us. We're looking for a friend—blonde, cute as a button with a really smart mouth?"

The man frowned. "You mean Alex? She had dark hair, but I could tell it was dyed."

"Maybe, she wouldn't have used her real name," Harry said.

Taylor pulled her hand free with effort, and at the big man's glance holstered her borrowed side-arm and pointed as Sofia. "She knows. She knows where our friend is."

"She's gone," Sofia spat through her own tears. She leaned over clutching her ruined knee. "She's gonna fuckin' die if you even think about going after Coil! Nothing you can do about it!"

"God I want to kill this bitch so much," Taylor said. Her empty tone continued to scare Harry. In his memories, she sounded like soldiers beyond caring about the atrocities they committed.

"What about our policy, though? Remember, that thing about not murdering anyone not named Coil? She's beaten, Taylor. We kill her, it's murder. Plain and simple. Is that who we are now?"

"If we don't kill her, she'll come right after us and try to kill us."

"Well, I didn't say let her go free," Harry said dryly. "Let's see what curses I know. Arthritis is always a good one. The really bad kind that'll make her hands curl up and shrivel. I could give her IBS."

"Really?" Taylor couldn't help but snicker, finally breaking the cold spell of rage.

"Yeah, but I have a better idea." He leaned over to her and through the ear hole of her PRT-issued tactical helmet whispered. "The Karma Curse."

"What's that?"

"Whatever she gives returns to her in kind, only more so. Almost like the Wiccan three-fold law, but more immediate and magnified by maybe one and a half, not three. She shoots somebody in anger, or to cause pain, she drops dead there and then. But if she just defends herself, she's fine."

"How long does the curse last?"

"It's Buddhist in origin," Harry said with a shrug. "It'll last through her next five lifetimes. She's probably doomed to be reincarnated as a Vietnamese water buffalo anyway with the way she's lived."

He looked up at the giant. "What's your name?"

"I am George Washington," he said, proudly.

"And I bet no one in their right mind teases you about that either, do they?"

"Not anymore," George said. "Alex was your friend?"

"She is, and she's in trouble," Harry said. He pointed down at Shadow Stalker. "And she's a murderer. So, I'm going to put a curse on her. You okay with that?"

"I know about curses," Washington said. "What you said, that is a just curse for one who does harm."

"Don't you fucking try it," Sofia said. She struggled to reach her crossbow but Harry had already started chanting:

"I curse you so, Sofia Hess,

In the name of magic and justice.

You consist of your desires,

and as is your desire, so is your will;

and as is your will, so is your deed;

and whatever deed you do, that you shall reap."

It wasn't like Harry's normal magic, where sometimes he'd shout out an odd pig Latin word or something. This time he almost sung the words. As Taylor watched, a green mist settled over Sofia's body before disappearing.

Sofia saw it to. "What the fuck did you do to me, Bailey?"

"I told you. I've cursed you. You be good and don't hurt anybody, it won't do a thing to you. If you punch someone just because you're a bitch, it'll feel like you got hit by a hammer. You shoot someone with that crossbow, you die right there on the spot. So, choose wisely."

"Bullshit!"

Before anyone could say a word, she whipped a small throwing knife from a pocket on her hip and threw it right at Taylor's face. She moved so fast, Taylor didn't even have to blink—not until the knife sank squarely between Sofia's own eyes, all the way past the hilt.

The girl flopped back, not even twitching, and lay unmoving in the mud.

"Wow she was a bitch," Harry muttered. "I mean, God, I told her exactly what the curse would do! Even bad people normally last a few hours before doing something that stupid."

"Stupid," Washington agreed. "But she died by her hand, not yours. God is satisfied. Where will you go now?"

"To get our friend," Taylor said. Harry heard the uncertainty in her voice, and couldn't help but notice how much louder the bugs were around them. She must have been shunting her emotions into them to keep control. She eyed the giant, noting the wicked cuts all over his body that bled freely.

"Harry, he's hurt."

"Oh, right. George, mind if I heal you?"

"No, of course not!"

Harry began casting the healing magic while Taylor searched with the surrounding insects. Schism and Qiana both made their way from the back of the van, like her, Danny and Kurt dressed in ill-fitted tactical gear.

"That was pretty hardcore there, Skitter," Qiana said. "You okay?"

Taylor looked down at Sofia and all around them bugs _skittered_ and _chirped_ loudly.

"I think I might be in shock," she admitted. "She made my life so fucking bad I triggered. She's dead and…and I'm just not sure I care."

She looked up toward a distant pile of trash in the street. "Some of her boys must have seen us," she said. "We've got eyes on us."

"Let's go, then," Danny said.

Harry was finishing up his healing. "Your bones are pretty tough, aren't they?"

George nodded.

"And Alex was your friend?"

"I protected her."

"Do you drink beer?"

George laughed. "I'm Namibian. Before Moord Nag, we made the best beer in Africa!"

Harry turned toward the girls. "I'm tired of being the only guy."

"More like you've just given up ever getting a harem," Taylor said.

"To-may-to, to-mah-to."

Stephanie laughed. "Did he really think he could get a harem?"

"Oh, he dreamed about it, I'm sure," Taylor said. She took a step closer to George. "We're Coven. Mage and I were the ones who killed Leviathan."

"Mostly me, just sayin'," Harry volunteered.

Taylor grinned tiredly. "Mostly Harry. We just escaped the Birdcage, and we need to find our friends. Lisa, who you knew as Alex, and a pair of little girls. Will you help us?"

"It is the right thing to do," George said with a nod.

"How old are you?" Qiana demanded.

"I'm seventeen," George said. "My parents brought me here when I was ten, after Moord Nag killed my sisters."

"Brute 1 or 2," Taylor guessed. "Did you think Alex was cute?"

He shrugged huge shoulders. "Broken."

That, right there, decided Harry. "How'd you like to join our gang? We don't kill anyone in cold blood not named Coil, we don't push drugs, we don't pimp out women because most of us _are_ women, and we want to make the city safer."

"And the world's convinced we murdered Legend," Taylor added.

"And that too." Harry nodded.

"Better question is do you have anywhere else to go?" Qiana demanded. "Your parents?"

"They were in the shelter down town."

Harry and Taylor both went very still. "Oh shit, I'm sorry," Harry muttered. "That…they told me the last shot that killed Leviathan took that shelter out."

"I know, I listened to the radio," George said. "People think because I'm very big that I am stupid. Except Alex. She knew. I speak five languages and was an honors student at Immaculata. But you did not aim your weapon at them. You defended the city against a monster. I mourn them, and honor them. But their deaths were not your fault. They died because Leviathan attacked."

"I was a little too scared of how big you are to think you were dumb," Harry admitted. "But you drink beer and you tried to protect our friend, so as far as I'm concerned you're my friend if you'll have me."

"Come on, let's head back to the lair and make plans," Taylor said. "At least now we know what happened."

"They'll be free soon," Harry promised.

~~Simurgh's Son~~

~~Simurgh's Son~~

That night, after they got back and used Harry's magic to confirm that Dinah, Tattletale and Aisha were not in Brockton Bay proper, Taylor retreated to her terrarium. She sat cross-legged on the upper level, guiding her Darwin spiders into weaving new under suits for all of them, and a new costume for her.

She very much tried to ignore the shaking in her hands as she instead concentrated on the sounds of her insects living and thriving within the protected environment of her terrarium.

Somehow, she wasn't surprised when she heard a pop behind her.

"It's been more than two hours," Harry said as he sat down behind her, his legs straddling hers. "Rules, you know."

Not saying anything else, he reached around until he gripped her shaking hands.

"I was going to kill her," Taylor whispered after a minute. "Fuck, I was going to shoot her again and again, and kill her."

"Yeah. Thank goodness for George Washington."

He said it so fervently for a moment she couldn't help but laugh. "Goof."

"Yeah, but I'm your goof." He pulled her close, like they did when they snuggled.

"I wanted to kill her."

"Yeah."

"And…I'm not sorry she's dead. What does that say about me?"

"That she was really, really irritating."

Taylor leaned back into him, snorting as she did so. "Goof."

"Yeah."

The interior of the terrarium was warm, but Taylor didn't mind the heat. She felt a little droplet of sweat form between where Harry's arm met hers. "Dad given you the talk yet?"

"Yeah. I told him in one of my past lives I had forty-seven children, and wasn't in a hurry to start in this life. I'm not sure he believed me."

"Not sure I do either."

"Five wives, population-depleting intergalactic war. Seemed like a good idea at the time. Hardest part was stopping the incest."

In all her short life, she couldn't remember anyone besides her Mom whom she would snuggle like this and feel so utterly at peace. All the worry and fear and anger of the day just bled out through that electric contact between their skin. "So, who are you, Bailey or Potter?"

"I'm the goof who loves you. Does the name really matter?"

She twisted in his arms until she faced him to see if he was grinning or joking. He wasn't. He looked…scared. Nervous. And she realized with a deep-rooted sense of shock that Harry had just bared his soul and it terrified him. Because he wasn't sure what she'd say in return.

"Dad would say at our age it's just an illusion."

"What would Hamlet say?"

She grinned. "The plays' the thing. I'm not an actor, though, Harry. I'm just Taylor. I've only known you for a few months. We've only been a couple for a few weeks. And one of those was in prison."

"And?"

She grabbed his face and kissed him so hard their lips ached. "And I love you too, goof."

"Good. So…you'll move in with me?"

"No." He deflated right before her eyes, until she started unbuttoning his shirt. "You're moving in with me. I have a better window."

"Oh. OH. Yeah, okay. That works."

Planning could wait. They knew they couldn't save their friends that night. So instead, they concentrated on trying to save themselves.


	48. Ascension 3

A/N: Chap 47 review responses are in my forums like normal. Interesting fact: THe _Point Me_ spell is a compass. Nothing more. The use of it to find objects or people is purely fanon. And I myself didn't realize this until I just looked it up now. Interesting, huh?

* * *

 **Ascension 6.3**

The men and women who remained from the DWA continued to inventory everything Coven brought with them from the alternate earth the next morning. They no longer showed amazement at just how much the bags held, or the fact that Harry was able to charm recovered, rusty old refrigerators into walk-in-sized freezers capable of holding enough food to stock a city.

There was just too much to do to be amazed any more.

Harry couldn't think about any of it. The first morning after their return—the first morning he woke up in a bed next to Taylor Hebert not with a cuddle, but with her elbow in her face as she flopped around in her sleep—he started working on finding Lisa.

That started in her room.

Her room was _weird_. No posters. No decorations except a half-starved bonsai tree. Bookshelves stacked not with books, but with old newspapers and magazines. He felt a little strange going through her chest of drawers (not to mention a little jealous when he realized just what she wore under her clothes most times), but he knew from his memories he needed something indelibly imprinted with _her_.

As fun as it was looking at her slinky underwear, he wasn't sure that was enough.

Eventually he drifted into her bathroom, thinking about hair or…or… _ew._ But, still… _ew._ Hair would work, he was sure, but…but… _ew._ "Damn, I can't do it by myself," he muttered. "Wait, I know!"

He rushed out of Lisa's room, and with only a single tap on her door stepped into Paige's room, knowing she'd be willing to… _Oh._ OH.

"Where's a fucking monorail when a guy needs one," he muttered.

Qiana shouted. "GET THE FUCK OUT!"

Not even a second later, a wall of pyroclastic ash blasted him out of the door way and against the wall opposite so hard he bounced twice. Blinking more from what he saw than what happened, he didn't notice how the rest of Coven came pouring out of their rooms in alarm.

"Harry, what happened?" Taylor asked. "You okay?"

"I…I…" Words failed him.

The door opened and Paige stepped out clad in a silk robe. "Are you okay?' she asked, first thing.

He nodded mutely, trying very hard not to look anywhere but her face.

"Harry, we'll make sure to lock our doors, but even then you should have waited for permission to come in first."

"Well yeah, I know that _now_ ," Harry muttered. "I'm really sorry. I thought of a way I might be able to find Lisa but wanted…it was kinda gross and involved girl-stuff and thought you'd help me."

"Why didn't you get me?" Taylor demanded.

"You were exhausted," Harry said. "You were having nightmares all night and I didn't want to wake you."

Taylor sputtered, but Paige just shook her head. "I'm not mad at you, Harry. And Qiana will calm down once you promise never to do that again."

The door opened and Qiana stepped out in short shorts and a T. He couldn't help but notice just how utterly _pissed_ she looked. "Yeah, absolutely I promise. I'll even put ward locks on your doors if you want."

The tension was interrupted by a gasp.

"You two are together?" Taylor said, as wide-eyed as Harry was a second ago.

On the other side, Stephanie giggled. "You and Harry are cute. You're not just blind about each other, but everyone around you."

"But…but…" Taylor stuttered.

Harry stood and shrugged tension from his shoulders. "So, are you two happy?"

Canary looked at Qiana, who glared at Harry for a moment longer before she too shrugged. "She's nice. The girls love her. Takes me as I am."

"And Qiana makes me feel safe," Canary said simply.

Harry ran a hand through his hair. "Okay, sure. Um…well, Taylor and I moved in together and I expanded her room for us. Do you want me to combine your rooms into a suite? Probably be able to get four bedrooms in there if you want."

"I think that would be very nice," Canary said. "What do you think, Qiana?"

"More room would be good," she agreed, calming down quickly.

"Thank you, Harry. Now, what is it you needed?"

Harry blushed so deeply he felt his chest get warm. "Well, you see, it's…I remember an old magic practice called scrying. The point me spell would find a direction, maybe, but we need exact coordinates so I can teleport her. If I have something linked to her, I can scry for her. The closer it was to her, the more powerful the spell. Blood is the most powerful of all. And, well, there was a…an old maxipad in her trash. I guess she was afraid to flush it or something."

"That's…that's fucking disgusting," Qiana declared.

"I _know_ that. That's why I came to bug you, to see if I was just nuts and should try a hair or something."

"Why didn't you just do it?" Taylor asked.

"And what… _touch it?_ "

They were staring at him. Harry shrank in on himself a little. "What?"

Paige shook her head, Stephanie giggled and Taylor simply stared.

"Wimp," she finally said. "Come on."

"You go do your stuff, I need to shower and get the girls up," Qiana declared before stepping back into her room.

Harry started to follow before pausing. With the risk of immediate immolation gone, Harry risked rushing forward and wrapping Paige in a hug. "Be happy," he told her. "You deserve it."

"I'll do my best. You take care of Taylor."

"I will." He stepped back, waved at her and then Stephanie, then followed Taylor back into Lisa's room.

By the time he reached Taylor, she'd already fished out the maxipad with a nearby tissue and placed it on the counter of Lisa's sink. "Now what?"

"Er, we need good maps of the east coast."

"Okay, we're going to get cleaned up first. We're going to eat because I'm starving. Then we pull out the maps and find where our friend is. Right?"

"Yeah."

She started walking away before looking over her shoulder. "I'll probably need help scrubbing my back."

Harry grinned. "I can do that."

~~Simurgh's Son~~

~~Simurgh's Son~~

They assembled in their communal kitchen over eggs, toast, bacon and pancakes Paige made for the girls and George. Their newest addition to Coven looked utterly comfortable surrounded by powerful girls as he ate a veritable pile of pancakes himself. Danny and Phil Lendy joined them as the head of Coven's small army of "minions".

When they were done eating, and with the sounds of their long-term refugees eating outside in the main floor, Harry and Taylor laid out a detailed map of the northeast coast purloined from Lisa's office across their dining room table.

The maxipad rested in a large porcelain bowl next to the map.

"So, you think you have a way of finding your friend?" Danny asked Taylor.

"Magical scrying." Harry said. "I remembered it when I woke up this morning. Magically, everything that Lisa was in contact with still retains a trace of her. The more contact, the easier it is to track that trace back to the origin. Blood is the most powerful trace because it is connected to the blood within her body. So, I'm going to cast a scrying spell to see if we can find her."

"Do we need to hold hands or chant mantras or something?" Jess asked.

Harry stared flatly. "It's magic, not Hollywood. Sheesh." He began tracing out the arithmancy in the air over the bowl with his fingers. Some part of him twitched to hold a wand, but the feeling was easy to control as the figures took shape in the air. Those around the table simply stared as he worked.

"How do you do that?" Stephanie finally asked. "I mean, magic. It's not like other powers."

"I'm not a cape," Harry said as he worked. "I'm fairly certain god reincarnated me from an ancient wizard that existed in the universe before this one."

Taylor snickered. "He said God was a blonde woman with a beauty mark on her lip."

"Looks a lot like Olivia D'Abo," Harry added. "You remember Bo Derek's Bolero? Did a naked shower scene with Bo Derek."

"I remember that movie," Phil said. "And the naked bodies were pretty much the only thing going for it. Question is how _you_ remember it. That movie came out before you were born."

"If it had naked girls in it, he's probably seen it," Taylor said.

"I was kinda raised by supervillains, it was part of the schtick," Harry confirmed.

"So you're nuts then?" Phil asked lightly.

"Probably. Except, well, I have hundreds of thousands years' worth of memories in my head. No one _taught_ me to do this. No one taught me arithmancy. I _remember_ it from my previous lives. Like I remembered how to use magic to make a construct that could accelerate objects faster than light to kill Leviathan, or make a portal to let us move between dimensions. So, maybe I'm nuts, or maybe I'm not and I'm really on a mission from a hot, sexy god. In the end, it doesn't matter. Because I found Lisa!"

The pad in the bowl disappeared in a flash of white fire. Overhead, the air shimmered into a vision of a huge, cement sunken dry dock with what looked like a rusted, Navy-gray destroyer sitting on massive bracers within it. They could clearly see the ship's designation: _USS Micandorf, DD-971._

"Holy shit," Danny said. "Danny, is that…?"

"Yup, the last naval ship ever built in Maine, about twenty miles north of here, across the river. That's the Kittery Naval Shipyard. They retired all the old Spruance destroyers and scrapped the Arleigh Burk line when they finally figured out Leviathan targeted military ships directly. The bastard pretty much ate our whole submarine fleet."

"Harry, can you…?" Taylor began.

"Yeah." He moved his hands apart, and suddenly they zoomed forward toward the aft of the ship, piercing the hull as if it were air, to center on a small, low-ceilinged room in the center of the craft where the engines would have been.

The room held a mattress on the floor with a single blanket and a thin pillow, a toilet in the opposite corner, a plain wooden desk and several computer monitors. Curious, Harry zoomed in even further until he could see what was on one of the monitors. She'd typed something in huge block print on her word processor.

 _Blasto put bomb in skull. Insurance for Coil._ _Dead man and manual switch. Dimitri. Dinah and Aisha alive but elsewhere. Panacea._

Even as they watched, she deleted the message.

The window evaporated. "How in the hell did she knew we were looking at her?" Taylor said.

Harry sank into his seat with a helpless sigh. "This is…this is going to sound lame, okay? Magic is fueled sometimes by emotion. Lisa's my friend. I love her, just like I love all you guys. I think…she probably felt me. But…guys, she has a bomb in her head like what Bakuda did! Last time I jumped into something like that, I got people killed. What do we do?"

"She told us what to do," Taylor said. "We get Panacea."

"She kind of hates us," Harry pointed out.

"I kind of don't care," Taylor said. Harry noticed she was slipping into her death-rage glare again.

"I don't either," Canary said, speaking for the first time since they started the meeting. "If she won't cooperate, I'll compel her. But we have to be careful. What if Coil has spies watching Panacea?"

"That's what glamours are for," Harry said. "One way or another, we're saving Lisa."

~~Simurgh's Son~~

~~Simurgh's Son~~

It should have surprised no one that Panacea was at Brockton Bay Memorial Hospital, working her ass off for nothing under a ridiculously heavy guard. The hospital was surrounded by a line of National Guardsmen with Humvee-mounted high-caliber machine guns. As they walked toward the hospital, Harry could see PRT agents on the roof in full tactical gear and…Glory Girl herself, walking across the front of the hospital with a soda in one hand and a large, clunky cell phone in the other. Harry couldn't hear her, but she certainly didn't look happy.

"They have signal?" Taylor muttered.

"Probably a Tinker-phone or something," Harry answered. "Remember, I'm hurt."

Given the gruesome glamour that made it look as if his leg had been split from his heel to his groin, he had no doubt they'd get in. On either side, Paige and Taylor each held an arm around their shoulders. They'd decided on a smaller party because Harry was going to have to teleport everyone away quickly.

They all looked alike as well, sort of. He'd glamoured Paige to look vaguely like a more ordinary Virginia Madsen, and made Taylor look vaguely as if Virginia Madsen and Olivia D'abo had a daughter. He himself looked like a blond bloke he'd seen in Surrey a lifetime ago. Glamours were easier when based on people he'd seen.

The triage nurse took one look at his leg, and the agony he was selling as if in line for a BAFTA, and paled. "ER 12. Panacea's in residence. Do you have insurance?"

"We don't even have a house!" Taylor said, which was very true. The amount of anguish she conveyed was even more BAFTA-worthy than Harry's performance.

The nurse just moved them into a crowded emergency room filled with people in wheelchairs or just standing around while exhausted nurses and doctors moved from one curtained area to the next. Soon enough they found themselves in a perfectly ordinary curtained area.

"Wait here, there are four other major cases ahead of you," the nurse said.

The moment she stepped out, Harry placed muffling charms on all the curtains. "Skitter?" he whispered.

"The place is crawling," she muttered. "Major infestations. Plenty of ammunition if I need it."

"Remember," Canary said. "We _talk_ to her first. Right?"

"Right," Harry agreed. "So, how long do you think…"

The curtains moved open and Panacea walked in, followed not by Glory Girl but by two armed PRT agents. Harry felt a surge of fear that somehow they'd been discovered until he saw with a clenched stomach that Panacea wore a shock collar—the same kind Paige said the PRT had used on her.

"That looks bad," Panacea muttered. "Do I have your permission…"

Harry quickly cast a pair of full body-bind curses before locking the two agent's feet to the floor. Taylor slipped around and closed the curtain. He let his glamour fade as Panacea's eyes widened. He couldn't tell if it was horror, rage or simple surprise.

"Okay, we have a minute to talk," Harry said. "So what the fuck, Amy? Why is that thing around your neck?"

"You…you…fuckers!" Amy hissed. "It's your fault, that's why! Mom found out I tried to talk to my biological father in the Birdcage, and that I was trying to leave New Wave to start my own clinic, and she had me detained as a fucking Class-S biotinker!"

"What, it's our fault your adopted mom is an utter, fucking bitch?" Harry asked. "Really? How does that work?"

"You assholes ruined my life!" Amy screamed.

"Amy, your life already sucked," Harry said. "I saw you at Arcadia. You were fucking miserable, and you were so unhappy you didn't even know how to not be miserable. When a lonely kid tried to be your friend, you went all the way to the PRT to keep him away. It's not our fault your life sucked. We're just the ones who helped you realize it."

"Get out!"

"Come with us," Taylor countered. "Fuck all this. Harry can get that collar off easy. Come with us. We promise shelter. Harry will build you a clinic out on the docks not even Alexandria could get into. We have DWA workers and their families that need help. Food, supplies. Protection. Anything you want, we'll get you."

"Why, so I can join your gang?"

"That'd be pretty cool," Harry admitted. "But mainly it's because Coil has Tattletale. He made Blasto put a bomb in her skull. And Amy…I would do anything to save her. You want me to go turn myself in and go back to the Birdcage? I'd go. Let Alexandria throw me into the damned sun? I'd do it. Just like I'd do the same for Skitter or Canary or…or you, if you'd let me. Just please help us save her. Anything, just please help us save her."

She stared at the three of them. "How come no one's come to see what's going on?"

"Silenced the curtains," Harry said. "But times ticking."

Silenced, but not secured. Glory Girl flipped the curtains open. "What's taking so…holy shit! Amy, move!"

Amy moved, but not away. Instead, she stepped between her sister and Coven.

Glory Girl's step stuttered. "Amy, did Canary master you? Move away, I'm…"

Amy pointed to her collar. "Why, Vicki? So I can keep being a slave?"

Vicki blinked and took a step back as if struck. "Amy, you know that's just until…"

"Until what? Until Carol convinces herself that I'm not Marquis? That I won't ever leave New Wave without their best PR figurehead?" Tears streamed down her face and she wiped her nose noisily. "Vicki, don't you see what she's done to me? What you've helped her do to me? I'm not her daughter, and I'm not your sister. I'm just another potential threat. You fucking abandoned me!"

"Amy, I'd never…"

"Mage, get this collar off me and get me out of here."

"NO! Don't you touch her!" Vicki scrabbled for something from one of the frozen PRT agents as Harry reached for the collar. A second later the collar activated, forcing Panacea to her knees as she screamed under a sparkling color of electrical volts.

Harry knew better than just blasting Glory Girl away. Instead, he used one power he knew worked on Capes. He charged her shirt with a portkey. She had a moment to surge forward as if to kill them all before she disappeared with a pop.

National Guardsmen and PRT agents were trying to rush through the crowded ER as Harry vanished Amy's collar, collected the sobbing healer in his arms, and felt both Taylor and Canary grab hold of him. One of the PRT agents got close enough to brandish his containment foam sprayer before Harry and his team disapparated back to their lair.

~~Simurgh's Son~~

~~Simurgh's Son~~

While Taylor paced about the room, Qiana played patty-cake with her twin girls, one hand for each of the girl's two; Stephanie helped Peter rollover while George and Danny watched; Jess had her chair rolled up to the dining room table with a laptop; and beside her Harry began tracing out a heartstone for Panacea's clinic.

It felt easier this time. Harry wasn't struggling to remember individual shapes and chains from his memories. It felt as if he actually understood each rune, and the chains of intent he built with them, as he traced them out on the thick paper. It wasn't going to be as large as the stone he made for the warehouse since the clinic would not be as large. Instead, he was planning on Panacea to have a luxurious personal suite and office facing the bay and separated by wards and locks from the more public clinic. He fully intended to put a Mage Fidelius on her personal quarters, since the front of the clinic had to be public.

Even so, he poured so many intent-based protections into the stone that even Alexandria herself wouldn't be able to break in if she meant to drag Amy anywhere the other girl didn't want to go. It's be absolute hell to charge, but he was sure he could do it.

The door to the common room opened and Paige led a red-eyed, splotchy-faced Amy Dallon in from their personal quarters. She looked curiously around the room, pausing especially at the three babies.

"So this is Coven, huh?"

"Not all of us," Taylor said. She stopped mid-pace and drifted closer, but not within touching distance. "You were trying to leave New Wave?"

"I met with an attorney to open my own clinic," Panacea admitted. "Another attorney in the office saw me there and mentioned it to my…Carol Dallon. It went downhill from there."

"Until they put a fucking shock collar on you," Harry snarled from where he worked on his runes. "Just like they did to Canary."

"Yeah, she told me." Amy took a deep, shuddering breath. "So, just so you know, I have no desire to join your gang. But…after everything that happened I guess I have to believe you. I believe you guys are innocent of all the crimes you were accused of, or there were some damned good mitigating facts. So, no joining, but I'm willing to work with you to get your people back. In return, I…"

Harry held up his board. "Already on it. Same protection we have here, with a little special protection and secrecy for your personal suite, and intention-based magic to make sure only people who don't mean you any harm can enter or stay. Should be able to get it done in a couple of days."

Taylor raised an eye-brow. "It took you longer for the warehouse."

"What can I say? I'm getting better."

Amy chose not to ask. "When do we go, then?"

"Not quite yet," Taylor said. "We're missing three people—Tattletale, Dinah Alcott and our own Imp, who'd just joined right before Leviathan. We think Imp was captured trying to protect Dinah. The magic Harry used to find Tattletale works best with blood or hair. We can't find anything from Imp because of the way her power works. And Genesis had no way of knowing we'd need it, so she made sure to pack all Dinah's things for her when she left. We need to find some hair from Dinah Alcott."

Amy looked from Taylor to Harry before nodding. "Easy enough. Mayor Christener was her uncle, and she had a room there while she was attending her last school. Family friends, see."

"Er, just to throw this out there," Danny said. "I've met the mayor. He may be a politician through and through, but he's not really a bad man. We're not going to hurt him are we?"

"Actually, I have an idea about that," Taylor said. "After all, we have two PRT transports and fifty-two uniforms. Why not use them?"


	49. Ascension 4

A/N: I took a tumble last night. No bones broken, thank goodness, but I'm hurting in places I forgot I had. My right arm especially is stiff and sore where I managed to make myself fall backward instead of face-forward down the steps. So I'm taking it easy today, which means no writing. Which means no Review Responses. I appreciate everyone's reviews, I just don't feel up to doing all that typing this morning.

Fortunately this chapter was ready.

* * *

 **Ascension 6.4**

The mayor's residence was southwest of the Towers district, a stone's throw away from Immaculata, the private Catholic school where Dinah was to go when she was old enough. It was one of the few areas of the city with restored utilities, likely because the mayor lived there. Decent man or not, Harry didn't doubt for a second the mayor would use his political power to ensure he and his were taken care of first. Or, at the least, those who served him would ensure he was happy whether he asked openly or not.

Around them, the majority of Coven sat interspersed with a handful of volunteers from the DWA, all of whom were ex-military men let go when Leviathan essentially scuttled the world's navies.

It was startling to see just how many capes they had now—with George's not inconsiderable addition and Genesis eager for some field work herself after a week's house arrest in the lair, they were fielding six capes. That was more than most major criminal gangs—hell that was as many capes as the Protectorate could field without the Wards.

Granted, Stephanie wasn't a great fighter yet, but her ability to split any surface she saw was even more powerful than the mercenary Faultline, who required touch to work.

Taylor's dad drove their van, while Phil drove the other van that held most of their volunteers. Every one of them was dressed in PRT tactical gear. Driving through the recently repaired streets between torn up glades and tree-filled hills, they looked like a perfectly respectable team of PRT agents on assignment driving to the Mayor's house half an hour after dark.

Taylor's plan called for them to tell the mayor there was a credible parahuman threat that made them have to search the house so Harry could collect some of Dinah's hair, and then leave. They hoped nothing would go wrong, and didn't plan on hurting a fly.

That plan went out the window when they reached the front of the Mayor's sizable estate and found a BBPD squad car parked on the sidewalk, the doors open and two police officers on the ground. Danny reached them before Taylor and checked their pulse.

"Alive," he said.

One of the cops giggled. "I can see your brain," the officer said with wide eyes. "It tastes like purple."

"Oh, they are so fucked up," Qiana said as she joined them.

Harry watched as Taylor knelt down behind the squad car and spread her power out, easily covering the entire estate as she sent out a quarter million scouts.

"There are…I'm having a hard time counting some of them. At least nine adults and two children," she told them quietly. "Maybe more. Something's screwy in there. Wait…masks. Fuck, capes. And…I'm not sure, but…I think Faultline's crew may be in there."

She looked at Harry. "One of the capes knocks my bugs out every time they land on him. Not dead, just out of commission."

"Newter, then," Harry guessed. "Coil made me study all the area capes. Newter's skin is like super-crack. Genesis, you'd be a perfect match for him."

Genesis had taken her gargoyle shape again and nodded. "Easy enough. Any idea who else?"

"Not sure," Taylor admitted. "But the one's I could actually detect are all in the same room."

"Danny, you and the boy's stay back," Harry said. "No point sending you guys up against capes that can drug you with a touch or spit napalm from their mouths. With the cops down, I think we can say they aren't having a calm discussion."

"I'd say so," Taylor muttered. "Faultline's people are good. We need to take them down first."

"Okay. Everyone line up for invisibility spells. They'll last for about five minutes. Don't move until they wear off on their own, or you can see Taylor and me," Harry said.

One by one Harry cast the invisibility spells to render Taylor, Qiana, Stephanie and George invisible. Unfortunately, it didn't work on Genesis.

"Huh, I guess it's because you're not really here," he finally said. "Okay, go…be scary out of sight or something."

"I can do that," she chirped with a chuckle.

They stepped through the chain-linked fence onto the mayor's yard, moving as quietly as they could until they reached the locked front door. A simple spell undid the latch. Harry was just thinking how unlikely it would be for someone like Faultline—reputed to be an excellent cape Mercenary—to leave the front door of a target area unguarded. As thought led to action, so too did common sense lead to a petite female figure in a glistening red suit and an odd gasmask just inside the door. Even without being able to see who they were, she began spewing white-hot fire at them.

Harry cast his most powerful shield, while Qiana answered fire with fire by launching a barrier of pyroclastic ash right in front of Harry. They heard a terrified squeal as the wall struck, cutting off the stream of flame long enough for Harry to stun the cape. Behind Spitfire, he saw another girl with scraggly, long blonde hair and a face covered in a green mask covered in black maze-lines.

The floor and wall around her were not that of the mayor's house, but of ancient-looking, weed-choked brick. The effect began to spread quickly before Harry hit her with another stunner.

Coven swarmed around him toward the living room, with George leading the way with a mighty roar (though it was more scream-like than a deep manly roar. Harry was much too cowardly to tell the big guy, though). Taylor followed behind with Stephanie, having already begun her attack with her swarms.

Harry took two steps to follow when something struck him like a bolt from a Zeus that just caught him in bed with Hera—a bolt that blasted him not just back, but all the way through the wall onto the Christner's front porch.

He fought off the bone-deep ache he got whenever something really pummeled his runes and rushed back into the house, only to find himself a second later standing with their DWA volunteers, while Danny Hebert stumbled on the Christner's porch.

"Trickster," Harry snarled.

He spun and teleported directly into the living room where Coven was in the middle of a no-holds-barred fight with Faultline's crew, Ballistic and Trickster. He saw Genesis very effectively beating the snot out of an orange-skinned kid with a barbed tail, while Qiana engaged a monstrous, gelatinous boy whose streams of snot-like goo struck her pyroclastic clouds with a sulfurous steam.

Stephanie was down not from any special power—Faultline just spun in a pretty acrobatic wheel kick that took the young cape down in one blow, only to run directly into George's fist as she regained her feet. The blow sent Faultline stumbling back against the wall with an angry growl. Taylor had her swarms surrounding the Mayor's family while simultaneously attacking Ballistic and Trickster.

Harry himself searched through the melee until he found the distinctive red and white mask. Unfortunately, Trickster saw him through Taylor's bugs the same time he saw Trickster, and a moment later Harry found himself back on the porch, while through the living room window he could see Danny Hebert was in the living room filled with capes suddenly fighting. That was Trickster's power—he could switch the positions of any two objects of similar size within sight.

Which meant Harry needed to be out of sight. He ducked out of the window, cast his best silencing and invisibility spells, and then apparated back into the living room against the back wall. He conjured a bowling ball into the air directly above the Trickster's head. The villain didn't even see what knocked him out.

Just like Harry didn't see what blew him through the wall behind him not even a second later.

"Bugger all!" he shouted as he scrambled back to his feet, only for another projectile to slam into his shoulder and send him cartwheeling over the back lawn like a toy. He barely had a chance to stand when he saw a silhouette stepped outside the house with several bearing balls in his hand. His face and chest were covered in riveted steel plates surrounded by a black robe.

"Ballistic," Harry said. "It's not what…"

A bearing ball slammed into him again, blasting him half way to the back fence. He struggled to regain his bearings in time for the next blow, but it didn't come. He picked himself up with a groan and saw Genesis carrying Ballistic into the air.

"Fucking listen to me, you asshole, or I swear I'll drop you!" Genesis screamed as she flew him even higher. "It was Krouse! He shot Melissa and Coil helped him cover it up. I swear to you, Luke, it was Krouse! Harry loved her. He'd never have hurt her, not in a million years! He was in the Trainyard trying to save Tattletale and the Undersiders from Bakuda!"

As powerful as her projected form was, Ballistic was still a strong young man with good training. He shot both arms up and out, breaking the hugging grip she used to carry him, and then dropped twenty feet in a fall that would at the very least have broken both his legs, if not killed him outright.

Harry caught him with magic before letting him fall gently. The taller cape scrambled back to his feet as Harry approached. "Luke, I swear to you, man. I swear, it wasn't me. Marissa killed Noelle because…God, Noelle was so miserable. And Coil wasn't going to help her. He bought people with whatever price he knew would work, and used them until done, then he killed them. It's how he worked. And Krouse…you know how he was. He was so pissed about Noelle that he…"

Harry ripped off his helmet and mask, knowing damned well it would show his tears. "Damn it, Luke! She was…she was the first girl who ever cared. Or at least seemed to. It was all Coil!"

"Luke, she told me she was going to kill Noelle," Jess said as she settled down on the grass beside Harry. "She came into my room and talked. She realized that Francis and Coil were lying to us—that Coil _couldn't_ help us. There is no way to help someone like Noelle. She killed Noelle, and Francis murdered her in revenge. And Coil set it up to make Harry look guilty because Harry knew Coil's civilian identity. Don't you see?"

"That was the PRT's official determination as well, young man. After all was said and done, that is."

The three capes turned to see the barrel-chested, red-faced Mayor standing in the Harry-sized whole in his back wall. All the man needed was a white handlebar mustache and a top-hat and he'd look like the _Monopoly_ guy. Behind the Mayor came Danny Hebert in tactical gear, but with his mask off.

"We won, Harry, Genesis," Danny said, still puffing from exertion. "Faultline retreated with her people. We have Trickster restrained. The mayor was willing to talk to us."

"Perhaps you could use the door to come in, though," the Mayor said.

Harry nodded tiredly. "Ballistic, are we done? I really, really don't want to fight you."

"Like you could, Little Man."

"I fucking killed Lung in the Birdcage, then escaped. Try me."

"Enough," Genesis said. "Ballistic, we're done. Get your ass in the house right now. Or I'll kick your ass again."

Luke snorted with disgust behind his mask, but did exactly what she said. Harry, mean time, cast a _reparo_ on the hole. The mayor simply stared, startled.

"I'll repair any damage before we leave, Mr. Mayor," Harry said tiredly.

They stepped into a shattered living room where Trickster lay on the floor, his hands bound behind him and a blindfold over his eyes. Harry could see the goose egg on his head. The surprising part, though, was the attractive young brunette in the dress bundled up next to him.

A young man with the same lines to his nose and cheeks as the mayor knelt beside her, glaring at Taylor, while the Mayor's wife cradled a cute little blonde girl of no more than ten on a sofa across from the bundled capes. Another _Reparo_ set everything to rights within the living room, with the girl _ahhing_ at how the magic restored the room to its previous state.

Danny clicked his throat mike. "Phil, we have the situation under control. Go ahead and set a perimeter. How are the cops?"

" _Still stoned,_ " came the response.

Harry joined Taylor and the rest of his team for a good, long stare at the Mayor and his family. It was the mayor who broke the silence by clearing his throat.

"Young man, I'm willing to listen to you because Bill Perkins from Magnate Shipping swears up and down that you were innocent of the charges you were sent to the Birdcage for. I've known Bill for forty years and never known him to be that wrong about anyone. But…" He pointed to Taylor. "That young woman viciously attacked my son's…"

Harry frowned and tuned the mayor out. The son looked like an athlete, but the song in the back of Harry's head sounded like the roar of a crowd. Frowning, he drifted closer to the brunette and heard echoes of the same voice, over and over again.

"Holy shit, Taylor is that Prism?"

"The one and only," Taylor said. "She tried popping out a clone when Faultline went after the mayor's daughter."

"Oh you jackasses," Rory Christener, who could only be Triumph in costume, said. "You utter trash. You just unmasked…."

A million bugs all chirped so viciously the house shook, silencing him. Taylor glared through the visor of her PRT helmet. "She's the bitch that let me into the New York PRT Headquarters, shut off their defense systems, and paralyzed Legend to make sure he couldn't defend himself when they sent me to assassinate him. She's more of a murderer than I was—I was mastered. What excuse did she have?"

Triumph's indignation sputtered. "What…what?"

"Legend saved my life," Harry explained. "He…picked me up from the street where the Simurgh tried to kill me, and flew me out of the containment zone. He checked up on me after that. He never realized I'd been kidnapped and enslaved by villains, but he cared about me. Taylor knew that I cared about him. And they knew he personally approved our plan to kill Leviathan. And Taylor thinks that Legend was about to take responsibility for what we did when they killed him."

"They who?" Mayor Christner asked.

"Good question," Taylor said. "Ask Prism. She was a part of it."

"Guys, don't get too distracted," Stephanie said. Her hair hung loose form her helmet and her chin bore a nasty bruise where Faultline put her down. "And remember there are kids in the room."

"Oh fuck, that means no cussing, right?" Harry asked.

Everyone stared at him until he smiled sheepishly. "Yeah, right. Anyway, Mr. Mayor, we actually came here because I need something to find Dinah," Harry said to the Mayor. "Panacea told us sometime she slept here. Can you show me her room?"

"Why?" Mrs. Christner said with an angry flush to her cheeks. "What else can you do to her that…that…"

"Ma'am, Dinah came to us," Genesis said. "I was there when Armsmaster and her parents took her. She told them that if they took her, they'd die and Coil would take her back. She told them that using her power, they did anyway, and now she's gone and they're dead. Harry here might be able to save her."

"This way," the Mayor said brusquely. He walked purposely through his crowded living room to the stairs, with Harry a step behind. "She'd often have sleepovers with her cousins, and stayed more often after…after her first kidnapping. She said you helped her then, too."

"We're only villains because the real villains labelled us that," Harry said. "We just want to help make the city better. I'm going to help Panacea set up her own clinic, damn whatever that harpy mom of her says. I'm going to help the DWA set the docks back up. We're going to get supplies out to our people. We just want to help the city recover."

"My earlier guests were ordering me to keep Washington from condemning the city," the mayor said as they reached the top of the stairs. "Which seems odd."

"Coil's got his own plans," Harry said. "Dinah's just another tool he's using to get there."

They stepped into a small room with white walls adorned with a few posters, a comfortable-looking full-sized bed, a night stand, and an antique dresser. It looked like what it was—a guest room reserved for the same recurring guest.

And on the night stand was a hairbrush. "And this was Dinah's?"

"Yes. It belonged to her grandmother and she inherited it."

"Even better." He paused and looked around the room before he met the Mayor's stare. "Sir, the Protectorate is more corrupt than you can imagine. I don't know what their long-term plan is, but I promise it has nothing to do with protecting the city. What they did to us was bad enough. But sir…they put a shock collar on Canary's neck and tortured her until she was forced to use her power to compel Skitter to murder Legend. Someone took us out of Brockton Bay right after we killed Leviathan, sent me directly to the Birdcage and shanghaied Prism into helping Taylor murder the only decent member of the Triumvirate. You can't trust these people."

"What would you have me do, Mr. Bailey?"

Harry shook his head. "Not Bailey. Potter. Or just Mage. And I'd have you…work with us. Maybe. Or at least hear us out. We can talk more, but I don't want the police or the city government as our enemies. We want to save the city, not burn it."

"And you'll return Dinah to us?"

"Er, we're actually going to keep Dinah with us where it's safe," Harry said. "But I can promise unlimited visitation. She won't be a prisoner, but a pre-cog as powerful as her would be in constant danger and the PRT can't keep her safe from Coil because he has too many people in it. That's why she came to Coven in the first place."

The mayor didn't look pleased, but he didn't say anything. The two started back to the living room when they heard a loud thump and screams. Harry flew down the stairs three steps at a time, but when he reached the living room it was already done. Trickster's body was propped against a wall, but the wall behind was glistening with blood and cranial matter. The villain's head was utterly gone.

Opposite, his shoulders slumped in defeat, Ballistic sank down to his knees. Genesis hovered over him, her gargoyle face twisted with grief. Skitter looked up as Harry rushed in. "Trickster admitted it," she said. "He admitted he killed Sundancer. Ballistic…lost it."

"Right," Harry said, swallowing in a dry throat. "I've got what I came for. What about Prism? I could curse her with IBS."

"You seem to like that curse," Qiana said.

"I stick with the classics."

"Can you make her have to tell the truth?" Taylor asked.

"Not without a potion using magical ingredients that don't exist in this universe. But hey, Coil told me Armsmaster had something that could detect the truth, right?"

Triumph stuttered. "How did you know that?"

"Duh, Coil was Thomas Calvert, assistant PRT director, and I guarantee he wasn't the only villain that's infiltrated your little group. So, Mayor, why don't you have Armsmaster ask Prism here if she assisted Skitter in the assassination of Legend. Seems pretty straightforward, right? Taylor, anything else?"

She reached down and with a long military knife that evidently came with the uniform, she cut Prism loose. "No, we're done here. Sorry about the mess."

"Guys!" Genesis pointed down at the kneeling Ballistic.

"Oh, right." Harry stunned him. The Christner girl screamed again as Ballistic toppled over. "So, that should have him out for an hour or so. Genesis, he was your friend. Leave him or take him?"

"He was a good guy, once," Genesis said sadly. "But now…. I think we leave him."

"Easy enough. Come on, Coven, let's go free the fuck out of our friends!"

"Language, Harry," Stephanie reminded.

"Fuck, right. Sorry."

As they left, Harry kept casting _reparo_ charms until they left the house in as good condition as it was before the night began. Except, of course, for the blood and body.

~~Simurgh's Son~~

~~Simurgh's Son~~

Rory tried his very best not to stare at the gruesome body which the villains decided to leave behind, or the other villain who murdered it. Instead, he forced himself to stare at his girlfriend of the past eight months.

Samantha and he served as Wards together in Boston before graduating. He came back to Brockton Bay, while Legend accepted her in New York. It seemed so perfectly normal that she'd request a transfer after the trauma of watching her mentor die like she did. He shouldn't have believed a word Mage or Skitter said.

Except…the doubt had been planted. It had always seemed odd that someone like Skitter could have killed Legend of all people, whose control over lasers was so effective he could make light bend corners or diffuse them to burn huge tracts of land. Rory remembered in one documentary how Legend stopped a forest fire by diffusing his laser into a white beam that burned the forest to create a firebreak. He should have been able to burn every bug Skitter had right out of the air.

"Sam, is it true?"

It wasn't Rory who asked. It was his father, who stood with his best politician's expression—the same he used to face down unions and state legislators alike.

Sam flushed down to her neck. "Mr. Christner, I can't believe you would…they're villains!" She sputtered and waived her hand toward the body of Trickster. "Skitter murdered a dozen people after she killed Legend. Mage killed an entire Endbringer shelter! Thousands of people. How can you believe anything they say?"

"Because they're the ones who saved my niece the first time, not you or your Protectorate," the mayor said. "Because they're the ones who saved us all tonight. Sam, Dinah told me herself that Mage was her best hope. My brother just couldn't accept that. Anyone I know who has had dealings with Coven say they are honest, decent people trapped by circumstance. But Rory obviously cares about you, and it seems there is an easy solution. Will you go with Rory to PRT headquarters and let Armsmaster ask you about your role in Legend's death?"

"Why would I…?"

They all heard the faintest sound of breaking glass. A red dot appeared in the left side of Samantha Beuchelle's head, while the right side of her head erupted in a geyser of blood and cranial matter not so different than what decorated the wall separating the living room from the entry way.

Kyla screamed.

Rory shouted, "Everyone down!" before diving and tackling his father to the hardwood floor. He glanced over his shoulder as Samantha collapsed near the still feet of Trickster, her blue eyes staring sightlessly at the ceiling as blood pooled around her head.

In the distance, they could hear sirens fast approaching.

"Don't say a word about this, son," the mayor hissed in Rory's ear. "Not a word."

"But…"

"You don't understand! The people who sold me that vial that gave you powers—they don't always trade in money. Sometimes, they trade in favors. If Sam got her power from a vial too…they _owned_ her, son. And you just saw what happens when they don't think their investment has any value. Keep your mouth shut."

Just feet away, a girl he thought he might someday marry lay crumpled on the floor, while his young sister clung to their mother crying. Kyla liked Sam, she made a point of taking her out for ice cream when she moved up. She taught her how to do French braids and shared her music play list.

 _First rule of assassination—kill the assassin._


	50. Ascension 5

A/N: Chap 49 review responses are in my forums as normal. Thanks for reading!

* * *

 **Ascension 6.5**

Sergeant Tonya Oppenlaender knew Exeter.

Like both her parents before her, and their parents before them, Tonya was born in Exeter Hospital. She went to high school with the rest of the kids of her generation at the old, overcrowded "Tuck" building, originally built in 1912 and showing every one of its years.

She did four years in criminal justice in Boston and thought briefly that city life was exactly what she wanted. She joined the BPD and served five years in the gang-ridden city. Over those five years she received five citations, two bullet wounds, and mandatory psychiatric and master/stranger counseling after a terrifying run-in with the Fallen.

She could remember as if it were just that morning when Tony crashed into her small, ratty apartment and the couch where she'd spent most of her leave in socks, boxers and her dad's old plaid button-up, and hugged her until she couldn't breathe. Her old on again/off again high school sweetheart had driven all the way from Exeter the day after she was released from the hospital and cleared by the PRT master screening after her run-in with Valefor of the Fallen

"I've got a ring," he told her, breathless as if he'd just run a marathon. "Got the house, Grandma willed it to me. Come home, Tonya. I don't care if you wear a badge and a gun. I don't ever wanna receive a call like I did this morning from your mom. I just…please come home, baby. It's where you need to be."

A marriage, two kids and six years later, she admitted to herself that he was right. She was right where she needed to be.

She wasn't just a veteran cop, she was native. She knew the people of her small town as neighbors and friends, and could spot an out-of-towner in a second. She could spot trouble even faster. The four she watched at that moment were about as troubling a group of out-of-towners as she'd ever seen.

An African-American male, approaching seven feet and three hundred pounds easy, stood out in Exeter like a unicyclist in a clown suit. He was accompanied by a well-built African-American female and a petite white female, all of whom looked like they were in their teens. Having served in Boston, she half expected them to put on masks and costumes.

The strange kids sat in a Ford Suburban registered to Amanda Hugginkiss at 1666 Liberace Blvd, Brockton Bay. Even if the registry itself weren't so obviously fake, the fact that the three were parked in a quiet residential area at night eating McDonalds and watching the recently sold Oldenmaier house set off pretty much every alarm bell Tonya had in her mind.

She started to reach for her car radio when she felt something on her hand and froze. A very large black widow spider crawled on the back of her hand. She started to carefully move to swat it when she felt something crawling on her neck. Suddenly she felt half a dozen more spiders crawling over every inch of exposed skin. Not all were black, either.

"That one's a brown recluse," a young, cold voice said. She turned to the figure who suddenly appeared at the passenger's side of her patrol car and stared at a face she'd seen on her television at night and in APB memos from every federal agency in the country. The fourth figure from the car.

The broad, thin-lipped mouth and high cheeks set in a long face looked striking and memorable, though not what most would consider attractive. Her hair was shorter than it was in the APB notice that adorned Tonya's cubicle at Headquarters.

"Skitter. Taylor Hebert. What the hell…?"

Hebert opened the door and calmly climbed in. Tonya noticed the pistol in the girl's hand immediately. Smith and Wesson, .32 revolver. The teen villain didn't even bother aiming it, though. Why bother when she had lethal spiders covering every exposed inch of Tonya's skin?

"Here's what's going to happen," Taylor said. "You're going to drive us to 811 Bittersweet Lane with your lights on. You're going to knock on the door and tell whoever's inside the house that there's been a report of a rabid dog on their property."

"What makes you think I'm going to cooperate with you?"

Skitter's stare looked empty and dark. "Your husband just put your youngest son to bed. The boy's name is Timothy Andrew. I know because your husband used his full name when he slipped out of the tub and ran naked all over your second floor just now. His room is covered with soldier ants. They can eat him down to his bones in an hour."

Tonya's eyes grew hot with rage and terror. "You bitch."

"You can't even begin to imagine," Skitter said. "If you cooperate, we leave and you hopefully never hear from us again. But understand this, Sergeant. I control every insect in this town. I don't have to think about making them do things any more than you think about scratching your nose. And once I give an order, they continue that order even if I'm unconscious or dead. Do you understand?"

Tonya ground her teeth. "Yes."

"Then let's go.'

Tonya fought back the old familiar shakes in her hands as she started the car and flipped the lights. She drove right past the Suburban, but in doing so saw that it was empty. The three odd teens inside were not there.

"There are twenty-two men in that house," Skitter said in a low, intense tone. Not a whisper, but quiet regardless. "They are heavily armed and will not hesitate to shoot a uniformed police officer. There is also a twelve-year-old girl, and possibly a second girl fourteen or more. Most likely the twelve-year-old has been tortured with drugs. Once you get the door open, you're free. Get the hell out and don't stop running until you're with your family."

"What the fuck is going on here?" Tonya demanded.

"We're rescuing one of the most powerful precogs in the world from a real monster," Skitter said. "Do you understand? Get the door open for me, then get the hell out."

"Right."

Tonya had to fight against every instinct she had to keep from looking at her own house, which was just across the street and one house down from 811 Bitterwseet. She tried to remember when the current owners moved in after Old Man Oldenmaier finally died and his house was sold as part of his estate.

She saw curtains flick aside as she pulled up to the curb. Whoever was in the house knew she was there, though with her lights on everyone on the street knew she was there. She noticed how the villainess beside her scrunched down out of sight in her seat.

"If you hurt my son, I will kill you," Tonya said simply.

"Let's hope it doesn't come to that, then," came the laconic response.

Tonya climbed out, adjusted her belt, and started walking toward the door. Once out, she pulled her collar receiver. "Dispatch, this is Oppenlaender. Be advised…"

Spiders. They covered her hand in a living fabric. Could the little bitch even hear her? The difference between a rookie cop and an experienced cop was pragmatism. _Not worth the risk._ "Be advised possible rabid dog in the area."

" _Copy_. _I'll let animal control know."_

"Copy. Out." She let the receiver fall back to her collar and continued toward the door. The spiders crawled to the back on her shirt. It wasn't a cold night, so she'd left her jacket off and could feel every one of the little monsters.

She lost the battle with the shakes but hid it by rapping on the door three times. "Police," she called. Even her voice shook.

The door opened to reveal a tall, well-built man with a cleft chin, short-cropped blonde hair and eyes the color of the arctic. He wore jeans like they were a pressed uniform, and a heavy wool shirt and jacket that barely concealed the bulge of a firearm. If she weren't scared out of her sights, hopelessly in love with her husband, and a consummate professional, she would have admitted the man was ridiculously hot.

He even sounded sexy. A controlled, smooth baritone voice. "What can I…?"

That's all she got to hear from that sexy voice of his, though. Before he finished his sentence, the air around Tonya exploded as a Biblical plague of insects swarmed into the house. Their passage was so intense it created a tunnel of wind that pushed her into the stunned man.

She was not expecting him to respond by trying to knee her in the crotch while yanking a large K-bar from behind his back even while he fell. While it wouldn't cause the same level of debilitating agony a man might experience, Tonya knew from harsh experience that a knee to the crotch hurt women too. She pulled her thigh enough to intercept the kick and instead concentrated on the more immediate threat of the knife, even as the two of them fell back into the house.

She didn't have to fight long. At least a thousand insects, from flies and mosquitoes to biting cow flies, slammed into his face much like they might slam into a windshield of a fast moving car. He lowered his knife as he reached with the other hand for his face. While it'd been a while since her last defense refresher course, she remembered enough to twist his wrist, free the knife and stab it down.

She scrambled back, her heart thudding so loud it made her ears ache, as blood gushed out of the man's neck wound. Loud steps forced her eyes up and she saw five men in heavy, black tactical gear just as good as anything their local Special Response team could have rushing toward her, automatic carbines already pointed right at her.

 _I'm sorry, Tony._

The shot that made her jump didn't hit her, though. She stumbled back from the man she killed as one of the new attacking men fell in a flash of blood momentarily lost in the swarming insects.

Hebert walked in, gun arm extended, with her revolver barking off shots without hesitation. Insects swarmed the faces of each agent within sight until they fell, one-bullet, one kill. Tonya stared in shock as this gangly teenaged girl snapped off shots like something from a movie set, perfectly aimed. When her revolver ran empty, she holstered it and removed an automatic.

Tonya was so caught up in the sheer impossibility of the teenager's marksmanship that she didn't hear the fight in the back until another heavily armed man flew backward into the floor of the living room to her left. She began climbing to her feet when the outer wall of that living room abruptly, inexplicably split in a series of straight lines until it formed a perfect square. The sides glowed bright red before the entire three square meter section of wall blasted into house.

The petite female from the Suburban rushed in, a tactical vest thrown over the blouse she wore earlier. She froze and looked up at the ceiling. Tonya started to run toward her as another hostile arrived, but the air in front of her suddenly blackened as a swarm of bugs blocked her path. _"NO_ ," the bugs seemed to say in a chorus of chirps and buzzes.

Abruptly the ceiling over the living room cracked just like the wall did. The hostile cried out and tried to scramble away only for the three square meter piece of ceiling to crush him to the floor. Resting squarely on the collapsed ceiling was a heavy four-poster bed. On it was a young girl who bounced boneless from the mattress, as if heavily asleep or…

 _Drugged._

The cape caught the girl in her arms and started to rush back out the hole she made, only to find her path blocked by two more hostiles.

One managed to get two shots off as the cape cried and tried to shield the girl with her own body. Bugs collapsed on the hostiles, followed a split second later by the unerring bullets of Taylor Hebert.

"Schism, you good?"

That was Hebert.

"Just need new shorts," came the shaky response. "Dinah's out of it."

"Everyone report!" Hebert again. "Anyone have eyes on Imp?"

"I have her. She asks why you took so fucking long." A high pitched, youthful male voice.

"Clear!" Female, a southern drawl in her words.

Tonya tried to register where the voices were coming from, but as she turned to move she felt her right leg give. Momentarily confused, she looked down to see blood spilling from her gut. "Oh shit, not again," she muttered as she fell.

"Fuck!" She tried to secure her sidearm as Hebert caught her head before it hit. "Schism, Little Man, portkey out! Qiana, help me!"

Tonya caught the briefest glimpse of the petite female clutching a girl not that much smaller than her disappear with a pop. Moments later the thick-set African American girl was by Hebert, both looking down at her.

"Fuck, gut-shot," the newcomer said. "Skitter, short of a cape there ain't no healing that."

She sounded Texan. Tonya fought an insane desire to ask her to say 'ya'll.'

"She has kids," Skitter said. "I'm not going to let them lose their mom."

"She worth getting caught?"

"Yeah."

Even as shaken and cold as she was, Tonya expected the new girl to fight. Stress was often what made criminals turn on each other. Instead, the girl named Qiana shrugged. "Your call. What'd you gonna do?"

Hebert removed a tinkertech phone of some kind and made a call. "They back yet?"

Tonya couldn't hear the response, only that Hebert nodded. "I need Mage here, now."

Not a second later, Tonya heard another pop and suddenly Harry Bailey, the slayer of Leviathan, stood beside his girlfriend, the slayer of Legend.

"What's…is that a cop? I thought we weren't going to hurt any cops?"

"I didn't shoot her, doofus," Taylor snapped back. "It was an opportunity. She got the door open and pulled attention to the front so Little Man and Smolder could take out the back. Schism came in the side under Dinah's room and got her out. Little Man got Imp. Tattletale okay?"

"Oh, yeah, that was easy," Harry said. "The bomb Coil put in her head was organic, so Panacea had it gone in a second. Tattletale's back home asleep. Panacea said she'd check Dinah and Imp for us, no cost. So, how'd the cop get shot?"

"Coil's men."

"Right. So…"

"Hurry, Harry. Her husband and eldest daughter are coming along with all the neighbors and more cops to see what's wrong. They don't need to see her hurt."

Mage knelt down and with a wave of her hand, Tonya's Kevlar vest and shirt were gone. "Wow, they must have been using those armor piercers," Mage noted. "Officer, my healing magic is touch based. I'm going to have to touch you, so please don't slap me."

"Boy, just fuckin' heal her," Qiana said.

Harry grinned, and then with surprisingly gentleness placed both his hands on her lower abdomen, his left right over the scar from her last C-section, the other over her navel. Abruptly a near painful heat, like a too-hot sauna, washed into her stomach. The heat burned away the pain and acid in her stomach, then continued north.

"Oh, fuck, she's had a run in from another cape," he said.

"What?"

"I can sense something fucked in her head," he said.

"Harry, we need to go!" Hebert snarled.

Mage shrugged. "If we let shit like this stand, we're not any better than Alexandria or the other fucks who murdered Legend. If we're going to heal her, then let me _heal_ her."

"Hey, what are you…?"

 _Tony._ Tonya caught a glimpse of her husband's horrified expression as he held their daughter in his arms. _God, get Kimberly out of here!_

Tonya's husband and oldest daughter cried out in alarm as the air between them and her solidified into a wall of living insects.

Mage let go of her bare stomach, leaving it cold from the absence of his hands. "Officer, there's a block in your memory. The kind that can fester until it develops real, physical consequences like an aneurysm. You run into any capes?"

"Valefor," Tonya whispered, too stunned to fight or move. "In Boston."

Mage nodded, frowning. "Look, I know some magic that should be able to restore the memory and remove the block. But it's not something I'm going to do without permission, not to you or anyone else who isn't trying to kill me or mine. But I should warn you, you're not going to make it past fifty if that thing stays in your head."

"You threatened my family."

Mage frowned, then scowled at Skitter. "Really?"

"It wasn't like she was going to cooperate," the villainess said. "Besides, there aren't any soldier ants in this town. It's not my fault she doesn't know her insects."

Mage snorted before looking down at Tonya. She was healed, she didn't hurt anywhere at all, but she was also surrounded by three deadly capes. "Why are you offering?"

"Because Taylor and me are orphans," Mage said. "And it sucks. No kid should have to see their mum die. Ever. So, will you let me heal you?"

Not trusting herself to speak, Tonya simply nodded. Mage grasped both sides of her head and looked into her eyes. She had a feeling as if she were falling, and then…then…

 _Moakley Park. Police and PRT agents took shelter as best they could as the Butcher's Teeth fought the Fallen, while Accord's army of capes sewed chaos into an already impossible situation. Officers and agents alike were shouting. One of the PRT agents was screaming for Protectorate Capes to come. Another screamed that Reynard was en route._

 _Tonya clutched her assault rifle to her chest as she squatted down behind Denny's patrol car. Denny himself lay in front of the car, unmoving and bleeding out. Giving all the capes involved in the fighting were villains, all officers on scene were 'weapons free'._

 _Not that a gun could do anything to Butcher or her pet capes._

 _She took a series of deep breaths to calm herself and get ready to go for Denny's body, when she abruptly realized someone was kneeling in front of her. The figure was slim and effeminate, but from the shape of his chin and Adam's apple not a woman despite the fairy-like mask and the blue lace dress he wore._

 _Despite Latin-brown skin, his eyes were an indescribable shade. Not black, not brown, not blue, just…perfect._

"Hey, you're pretty hot for a cop. Show me your tits."

 _She did, pulling off her tactical gear so she could unbutton her shirt and lift her bra. She didn't even think twice about it._

"Nice. Too bad we don't have more time, love pussy in uniform. So, how 'bout this. Get naked. Because I wanna see your body. Then take that gun of yours and shoot every cop you can. If you survive, and get married and have kids, I want you to wait until your oldest kid graduates high school, and then fucking shoot him or her in the head. Sound good?"

"Yes."

 _A corner of Tonya's mind screamed and raged even as she stood up, braving flying bullets and knives and all the other weird powers, and stripped naked. The horrid cape, Valefor, smirked as he stared at her body. When she was fully nude, she lifted her assault rifle and walked toward the nearest patrol car. That would have been Sergeant White, her immediate superior._

 _Like she'd been, he was huddled behind his squad car for protection, along with a rookie and Officer Michaels. The rookie saw her first._ "Holy shit, is that Parks?"

 _Parks. Her maiden name. Before Tony came and shared his with her. She nodded to the rookie, then shot him in the head. The kid was just two years younger than she was, but two years in Boston was a lifetime._

"She's mastered!" _White shouted_. "Where the fuck's the containment foam?"

 _She lifted her gun, aiming at White's head, when her time ran out. Michaels shot her, upper right shoulder, a second in her thigh. She dropped with a scream of anguish and pain, abruptly released from Valefor's power, and didn't move again until….until…_

She found herself blinking up at intense green eyes. It stunned her to see that Mage was teary eyed. "Fuck," he whispered. "I'm sorry, Tonya. It was still there—the compulsion. Twelve more years, you'd have had to shoot your daughter."

Tonya reached up to wipe her eyes. "It's gone?"

"Yeah, it's all clear. You're healed, completely. Went ahead and took care of the keloid scarring, too. My advice, stay out of Boston. Place makes Brockton Bay look…nah. Take that back. Brockton Bay's still worse." He stood before swaying a little.

"Harry!" Taylor's voice held real concern, like Tonya's herself when Tony collapsed because of his appendicitis. It was the tone someone in love used when their loved one was hurt.

"Fine, just…was a bit harder to do than I thought it would be. We need to go."

"What about the Surburban?" Qiana asked.

"I can apparate us to it, then we drive," Harry said.

He nodded down to Tonya. "Live a long life, Officer. Make sure your kids know you love 'em. And stay away from Capes. We're nothing but trouble."

Abruptly all three were gone. The wall of insects separating her from the rest of the house collapsed, revealing almost the entire Exeter police department, two county deputies, firemen, and bodies from all the hostiles they killed.

There were also six PRT agents in full gear with containment foam dispensers on their backs. "Sergeant Oppenlaender, your record suggests your familiar with Master Containment protocols. Will you cooperate?"

Tonya looked down at her bare stomach. Her C-section scar was gone. She glanced up at Kimberly, six and teary-eyed to see her mother on the ground amidst the carnage. Tony held her in his arms on the edge of the broken home, stricken with worry.

But they were alive. "Yeah, I'm fine, I'll cooperate," she said. "Tony, sweetie, I'm fine. Take Kimberly back to the house. The protocols take two days, then I'll be home. I promise, I'm okay. Better than okay."

 _Because her little Kimberly was_ NOT _going to get shot on her graduation day. Fuck you, Valefor!_

* * *

*This chapter was heavily inspired by the first season of the Netflix series _Jessica Jones. Tenant's Purple Man was one of the most insidious villains I've seen portrayed on the small screen. He is my inspiration for Valefor._


	51. Acquisition 1

A/N: Chap 50 review responses are in my forums as normal.

* * *

 **Acquisition 7.1**

"Of course, Coil got away," Lisa said the morning after her rescue. The bitterness left a bad flavor in everyone's mouth. "There were three goals—me, Dinah, and Coil. He knew he couldn't stop you for two of them, so he made you choose. All things considered, I'm not going to complain that you chose Dinah and me."

On the morning after their rescue of their friends, Harry, Taylor and Lisa were not in the Coven common room. They weren't in their lair at all. Instead, Lisa sat on a hastily conjured recliner near the small office in the Terrarium with a cold compress against her forehead, clad in loose, faded pink pajamas while Taylor and Harry tried to undo almost two week's worth of neglect in his garden.

Harry knew everyone around their lair was busy. Danny, Phil and a dozen other of their DWA volunteers were kitted out to provide armed escort for Panacea as she and Schism toured the surrounding area for a possible location for Panacea's new clinic. They had a secret meeting scheduled the next day with the Mayor's office about the property.

Paige and Qiana were both playing nurse to Dinah and Aisha. Aisha's leg was healed instantly by Panacea, but the girl despite her bravado was obviously shaken by the experience. Dinah, like Lisa, was forced to overextend her power so badly under duress and drugs that even with a cleansing potion to wash out the newest round of addiction Coil forced on her, she could barely get out of bed.

Still other DWA volunteers were with Tiny Man as they made rounds of the local shelters and neighborhoods, looking for the families that were forced to abandon Coven by the PRT. Despite the absence of internet, phone or other basic utilities, word had spread through the city already that somehow the core of Coven has escaped the Birdcage and returned to Brockton Bay. Some DWA, Magnate and Seaboard Rail employees and their families had begun drifting back as soon as the sun rose. So far, they were hosting over two hundred refugees with more to come.

There was so very much to do, and so little time to do it.

"So you're saying it's impossible to actually catch the fucker?" Taylor asked. She knelt down in one planter box near where Lisa rested, working on the snowdrop and aconite.

Harry was finishing up the dittany and was about to water the mandrake. He paused, though, when one of the mandrake stems leaned away from his hand.

"Not impossible, just really, really hard," Tattletale said, oblivious to Harry's confusion since her eyes were closed against what she described as a raging Thinker's headache caused by prolonged, continual abuse of her power. She didn't mention the time spent carrying a bomb in her skull, and neither Harry nor Taylor mentioned it either.

Harry reached for another mandrake stem, and like the first this one leaned away from his out-stretched hand. He leaned back and absently fingered the dittany he'd just watered. Taylor used her bugs to weed the garden far more effectively than he could, but the care and planting of the plants required a personal touch.

The plants tingled against his fingers. He'd planted the purely non-magical American dittany as a less-powerful alternative to true dittany for the sleeping potion they used against the Merchants before Leviathan. But when he squatted down to stare intently at the plant that sprung from the seeds he planted, the tiny little violet flowers that topped it were…fluorescent orange, not violet.

 _Why hadn't he noticed before?_

While Taylor and Tattletale talked about how best to kill Coil, Harry walked beside his girlfriend and knelt beside the planting box to study the Snowdrop he'd planted as a mundane substitute for Moly. But what…

 _Oh. I like that._ Even as she spoke to Tattletale, Taylor absently ran a hand through his hair, making his scalp tingle. He didn't want to get distracted, though, because the plant that sprouted from the snowdrop seeds was not Snowdrop. The stem was black, oil-black, in fact, and the single flower atop each plant was a white so pure it glowed.

"So, when did you two finally figure it out?"

Harry blinked and looked up. "Just now!" he exclaimed. "It's amazing."

Lisa stared back with a wry smile even as she pressed her compress to her forehead. "You just now figured out you and Taylor are made for each other?"

"Er…no? What are we talking about?"

"I was talking about the fact that Taylor can't keep her hands off you, and you were purring like a fucking cat when she did touch you," Tattletale said. "I could figure out what _you_ were talking about, but I don't want to use my power right now."

"The Birdcage," Taylor said simply. "We…figured things out then. And I have no idea what Harry's talking about."

"I can show you!" Harry said. "I can show you a mandrake and…and…well shit, then your eardrums would rupture and you'd both die. No, dittany!" He rushed back to the rows of dittany and carefully pulled off a single leaf which he brought to Lisa.

"Put that under your tongue and just suck on it."

"I'd tell you what you can go suck, but you seem serious," Lisa noted. "Fine." She took the leaf and slipped it under her mouth. Only to immediately yelp, drop her compress, and spit it out. "What the fuck was that?"

Harry frowned. "It was dittany. It's a healing herb. Why, what happened?"

"It started to relieve my headache, which is impossible!" Lisa said. "What is it?"

"I told you, dittany! Real, magical dittany! When I reached for the mandrakes, their stems moved away from me and that's what made me realize. By the way, do not pull out the mandrakes once they mature. You'll die. Badly. But…the moly! That's the very same magical ingredient that Hermes gave to Odysseus to protect against Circe's magic. Of course, in reality Hermes was actually just a wizard who was trying to steal the formula for Circe's transfiguration potion, but still, that's real, magical moly. Everything I planted has…has become magical!"

"How?" Taylor asked.

Harry frowned, thinking through his various previous lives until he remembered a lecture Professor Sprout gave to a twelve-year-old Harry Potter. "Magical plants are magical because magical people plant them," he repeated the old mantra. "Holy shit, it really is as simple as that. I've planted an honest-to-Merlin, magical witch's garden!"

He went back to the dittany and pulled another leaf which he handed back to Lisa. "Keep it in this time, you're looking at what may be the most valuable plant in the world. Distilled Essence of Dittany can heal almost as well as Panacea can."

With a nod and wide eyes, Lisa slipped the new leaf back under her tongue. Harry, meanwhile, wrapped Taylor in a hug and swung her around, kissing her soundly. "Do you know what this means?"

"What?"

"Better potions! Magical ingredients! It means…Taylor, I can use the mandrake, moly and my blood to infuse parts for a new magical focus! I can draft a potion that can…" He blushed. "A potion that can take away your monthly cramps and be a perfect birth control with only one dose every new moon. Clarity potions, cleansing potions, liquid luck and polyjuice. Skelegrow and…and…I'll need to fashion a stirring wand, but the mandrake will work for that. I just…"

"Harry!"

Lisa's voice broke his train of thought.

"What?"

"You have six planter boxes of plants, Harry," Lisa pointed out. "If you use up all your ingredients…"

"Yeah, you're right." Harry sighed. "I just…Taylor, I'm going to have add second and maybe third level balconies, okay?"

Taylor smiled, and for a moment the sheer beauty of the expression swept him away. "That's fine," she said.

"Holy shit you two have it bad, don't you?" Lisa said. Abruptly she hugged him both. "When I set you guys up, I was just hoping to get Harry laid and Taylor relaxed so you'd stop bugging the shit out of me and Paige. But this…this is beautiful."

"You set us up because we were bugging you?" Taylor said, hurt.

"Harry kept wanting to see my tits," Lisa pointed out.

"I still wouldn't mind," Harry admitted. "I mean…well, yeah. Tits. Who wouldn't?"

To his utter shock, Lisa flashed him. She pulled up her thick flannel pajama top and flashed him. She then dropped the pajamas back down and smirked first at Taylor's stunned expression, then his. And then she shook her head and sobbed, her eyes suddenly tearing up out of the blue.

Harry froze, overwhelmed first by the sight of some genuinely awesome breasts, and then by the sudden flood of emotion that followed. Taylor, though, seemed to get it as she pulled the weeping girl to her. Harry stood nearby, running a hand through his hair and feeling uncomfortable and a little lost, until Lisa grabbed him and pulled him into the hug as well.

"You came for me," she said, even as she hiccupped. "You came, and you saved my ass, and you didn't even think twice about it. It wasn't even a decision for you, was it?"

"Of course not," Taylor said.

Lisa nodded, then hugged them both hard, as if her very life depended on it. "The day you arrived from England, Harry, and the day you saved us from Lung, Taylor, are possibly the two best days of my life. Because they led to this, now. Thank you." She kissed Taylor on the lips, and Harry's brain shut down as he had visions of monorails and…and…

Then she was kissing him, and it was wonderful and sweet but not…

"You see now, don't you?" she said as she parted. "I know you dream about it, but you have what you need. You and Taylor really were made for each other. Stubborn, loyal and with the strongest moral code ever."

"Yeah," Harry admitted. "I love her. I really do. And I love you too, you know."

"Me too," Taylor admitted.

Lisa sobbed again. "I know. And if you say it again, I may have to shoot you both, because I love you too but it's…it's a lot. You know? Where we all come from? So…so I'm going to go find out how to get our internet back because life's just bullshit without internet, and you do your magical plant and bug shit, and…and…yeah."

She hugged them each again before walking quickly down the stairs to flee.

When they were gone, Taylor looked at Harry and said, "I wish to God I had tits like that."

"While I wouldn't mind," Harry told her, "I happen to like yours very much."

"That's because I let you kiss them sometimes."

"Sometimes like now? Now is a time, right?"

She grinned. "So it is."

"Wait until I'm out of the fucking building, you two!" Lisa called from the ground floor.

Thirty minutes later found Harry and Taylor snuggled together, sweaty, naked and glowing, on a conjured mattress in their terrarium office, when they heard gunfire outside.

"Fuck," Taylor muttered.

Harry propped himself up before leaning over and very intentionally suckling one of her petite and yet perfect breasts. When he lifted his head, he smiled. "Yes we did. And it was awesome!"

She ran her hands through his hair with a tolerant smile. "Doofus. Come on, let's see what's wrong now."

"Can't we just call someone?" He couldn't help but whine a little.

"We only have three of those satellite phones, and none are here. Come on, lazy-bones."

They quickly stood, cleaned up by way of Harry's magic, and dressed in normal civilian clothes before rushing down stairs to emerge in a pitched battle.

Taylor and he both stopped inside the wardline around the Terrarrium and stared in shock as a hundred or more heavily armed thugs advanced from the city across the ground the DWA, Schism, Harry and Qiana had cleared in front of the lair.

Coming from the water itself was a force of a hundred or so people that seemed comprised of the homeless wielding baseball bats and the occasional pistol. They were backed up, however, by…by something that was very hard to describe. If an amphibious assault vehicle was gang-banged by an Abrams tank and an air craft carrier, it might have resulted in the monstrosity that crawled out of the water. Two long boat hulls, probably belonging at one time to some nice yachts, were outfitted with tank-style treads hooked up somehow to a monster-struck wheel assembly to form a sort-of catamaran style surface, upon which someone had placed the body of an El Camino. Mounted in the bed of the El Camino body was a very large Tinker-made rifle that was spitting out little blue shards of destructive energy that held the approaching enemy forces at bay.

Riding in the back of the monstrous vehicle, wielding that Tinker gun, stood none other but the illustrious Skidmark.

"Come get some you cock-gobbling butt-fucking cunts!" he roared.

"Eloquent, isn't he?" Taylor muttered.

"I don't know, with a schlong as big as he has, I'm not sure he needs many words."

Taylor rolled her eyes in disgust.

Ordinarily Harry would have been okay letting the two sides duke it out, but unfortunately he saw Panacea, Schism, Danny and Phil crouched down in the shadow of one of the washed-up hulks from the boat graveyard surrounded by the DWA volunteers, one of whom was down, and another two or three obviously injured.

The whole equation changed when a vaguely lupine shape comprised of twirling steel blades rushed from the line of city-side attackers with a roar. He was followed by a short, athletic blonde in a buzz-cut wearing too-tight cut-offs, a white tube-top, heavy black boots and a cage-like hockey mask over her head. On the other side of the steel wolf was a bare-chested man in a tiger mask. They were looking at the heavy-hitters of the Empire 88.

"Nazis," Taylor muttered. "I hate these guys."

Harry snickered. "That was a great movie."

She frowned. "What are you talking about?"

"Never mind. Go for back up, I'm going to get our people out."

He started forward then paused when Hookwolf hit the front line of the Merchants. The sound of screams and ripping flesh briefly overwhelmed the rest of the fight and made Harry wince. Skidmark responded with a prolonged burst of fire from his tinker cannon that blew Hookwolf back without really hurting him.

Another of the merchant capes came barreling from the huge vehicle, which Harry quickly realized had transported the entire gang over the water to their area of the docks. The figure towered over everyone there, moving like a steam-punk take on Armsmaster. The suit was rusted and frankly ugly to look at, with a single steam valve off his back and gauges like shoulder humps beside it. Every step Trainwreck took was accompanied by the squeal of metal and the hiss of steam.

He slammed a fist into the tumbling Hookwolf hard enough to send the E88 cape flying. A step behind came Mush, going full-giant mode in a second body of collected trash and debris. He swung a car-sized fist comprise of trash at the tight-bodied blonde, who bounced away easily while slashing with a pair of kamas.

The heavily armed E88 minions continued to advance, moving steadily not toward the Merchants, but toward Panacea's group. "Holy shit, they're all after Amy," Harry muttered.

"Go!" Taylor cried as she darted for the lair, careful to stay within the shared wardline that protected both buildings.

Harry apparated and appeared with a pop right in the middle of his people. "Damn, Panacea, I can't take you anywhere, can I?" Harry said.

Panacea bit back a scream. "Where were you?"

Harry glanced at Danny and blushed. "Er, busy. But I'm here now. Danny, can you or Phil grab onto that man? I'm going to charm a portkey into the lair."

They dragged the fallen man into their group as Harry summed a metal pipe that just happened to brain the closest E88 thug on its way to him. He quickly imbued the pipe with portkey magic. "Everyone grab hold. On three: one, two…"

They appeared in the middle of the lair with a loud pop. "Three."

"You're supposed to make it go on three," Panacea said, obviously rattled and trying to cover her terror with anger.

"Eh, I'm a high school drop-out. Who says I can even count?" Harry said with a shrug.

The rest of their team was running toward them, those that were there. Qiana was already kitted out in their borrowed PRT gear, as were many of the other DWA volunteers, all of whom were prepared to fight to protect their own. Genesis had generated her dragon form, also obviously ready for a fight. Taylor had thrown on a rough Kevlar vest and a holstered pistol. Using her bugs to aim, Harry knew she was a preternaturally good shot.

They emerged from the lair just in time to see the E88 utterly obliterate the Merchants. The three heavy hitters—Hookwolf, Stormtiger and Cricket, were joined by almost the entirety of the E88 capes. Harry, because of his research for Coil as a slave, knew every member by sight.

Kaiser himself was in play, generating blades with ruthless efficiency against the desperately retreating, terrified Merchants. Beside him, the giant Barbie twins, Fenja and Menja, made quick, laughable work of Mush. They didn't just beat him, though. One slammed him down with her shield while the other stabbed the disgusting goblin of a cape through with a spear-tip the size of Harry's leg.

The cape's death scream set Skidmark to cursing even louder. Squealer's vehicle abruptly launched missiles that flew tight toward the twenty-foot tall twins. Fenja jumped in front of her twin with her shield to intercept the missiles. Even so, the five weapons exploded with sufficient power to send both giant women flying backward, shattering the shield and Fenja's arm. Both shrunk back rapidly as they fell.

Rune answered with a rain of dismembered cars, old water heater tanks and chunks of concrete thrown by her power with sufficient velocity to crack one of the hulls of Squealer's vehicle. Trainwreck was falling back before Hookwolf's vicious counter-attack, while Stormtiger, Cricket, Krieg, Viktor, and Alabaster led the unpowered E88 thugs directly into the Merchant minions, slaughtering them with an abandon Harry had never seen in a cape fight. It wasn't even really a fight any more—just a slaughter.

He looked around but noted Purity was not there. He knew she'd left Brockton Bay with Fog, Night and Crusader, but always harbored a fear that she might return. According to the news, she didn't just take her daughter with her, she'd taken Kaiser's only son as well.

The leader of the E88 obviously had some unchecked aggression to work off.

"Holy fuck," Qiana muttered from behind them.

The fight ended abruptly when Kaiser made a lifting motion and a veritable forest of streel spikes shot out from the ground underneath Squealer's vehicle. Amidst the sounds of dying Merchants, Harry heard a woman's scream of agony.

"Babe!" Skidmark shouted. "You cock-cobbling son of a…."

He never finished. A long metal spike shot up from the ground, piercing the El Camino bed and shooting through Skidmark's chest with a wet _slick_ sound. Skidmark coughed blood and stared down at the two-foot long protrusion in his chest before going limp, impaled.

"Skids!" The cry from within the vehicle sounded weak, and Harry felt certain that Squealer would soon join her lover.

All around, the last Merchant minions were cut down viciously, even those that surrendered or begged mercy. The last fell to one of Cricket's _kamas_ , blubbering and crying about her kids. Cricket just grinned as she took the emaciated woman's head with a single swipe of her hook-shaped blades. She was covered in blood-splatter that soaked her tube-top almost as if she were in a wet T-shirt contest from hell.

Harry shuddered as she made a point of licking blood off her forearm.

Kaiser walked toward them across the killing field, as splattered in blood as the rest of his capes. They fell in behind him. Menja cradled her arm and bore burns, while Fenja looked bruised and burned as well from the last fusillade of missiles Squealer shot. Hookwolf resumed a more human shape, looking like the male counter to Cricket in his jeans. He had more hair on his tattooed chest than Harry did on his head, and since the unmasking of E88 didn't even bother with his own mask. He looked vaguely like a Swedish porn-star, though the blood didn't help anything.

"Mage, Skitter, welcome back to Brockton Bay," Kaiser said with a smarmy smile, like a used car salesmen. "Given your recent experiences, I would have expected you to be more cautious. When our spies told us the Merchants were making a move on Panacea, I assumed she would be safe inside your impressive lair. Instead, I found her caught in the open. You're lucky we were in the neighborhood."

 _In the neighborhood with a few hundred of your close friends,_ Harry thought. Behind their Wardline, they weren't in immediately danger. But Harry had no illusions about walking over E88. Not at all.

"Thank you, then," Harry said, choosing to play politics in the face of the savages. "What do I owe your assistance to?"

"You eliminated a potential nuisance to us before it even began," Kaiser said with a regal nod. "We were able to run the Panthers out easily without their leader. Good work, on that. Shadow Stalker was always a troublesome irritant."

"I think I'm going to be sick," Taylor muttered.

Harry squeezed her hand but met Kaiser's smug grin head on. "So, you weren't after Panacea yourself?"

"We have our own healer, we don't need yours," Kaiser said, now sounding vaguely disappointed that Harry would even ask the question. "However, it seems we are at an interesting crossroads. The Merchants, as you can see, are now gone. The ABB ceased to function upon Lung's capture and have already splintered. There is only now the E88 and Coven."

Kaiser made a point of looking at Qiana, then at the handful of black men who worked with the DWA. "There are, obviously, some philosophical differences between our organizations. And yet, I feel there may be room to come to an…agreement."

"In other words, if we don't fuck with them they won't try to murder us." Lisa stepped out of the lair with a glass of wine in her hands. She wore a simple yellow dress and slippers, and had her hair in rollers fresh from the shower she must have just emerged from. "Hello, Max. How's Theo doing?"

Kaiser's smile turned vicious. "He's doing fine, I'm sure. Perhaps you'd be interested in meeting him? I'm sure Brad could get you ready for the son of Kaiser."

Brad's face remained blank, but beside him Cricket grinned and grabbed her crotch with an obscene hip thrust.

"From what I understand Theo wouldn't know what to do with me even if you gave him to me," Lisa snapped right back with her own vicious grin. "He is your son, after all."

Rune very slowly made sure to turn away from the exchange and cover her mouth.

"As fun as it is to see Kaiser stumble against a Thinker who's main power is to win battles of wit," Taylor began. "What are your terms?"

Qiana started as if shocked and glared, but didn't say anything.

"Surprisingly intelligent of you," Kaiser said. "We split the city. E88 currently controls central and southern downtown, the Beach front and the shantytowns to the south. Coven will control the entirety of the Docks to Captain's hill, the trainyard and surrounding areas. Boardwalk will be neutral ground. A truce will stand for six months or until violated. Any violations will be discussed on neutral ground before the truce is declared void."

"And the Protectorate?" Taylor demanded.

Kaiser scoffed. "What Protectorate?"

Which pretty much summed up the situation, Harry hated to admit. He looked around at his people, noticing the angry expressions on some. "Coven isn't a dictatorship. We'll have to discuss it. We'll have an answer in two hours. I'm assuming Medhall?"

The armored leader of E88 looked as if he might push the issue before nodding. "Two hours, then. I hope you make the right decision, Coven. It would be unfortunate for your people if we had to make another example of you."

With that, E88 turned to leave, minions in tow. Harry watched the retreating force, which for all intents and purposes was an army. They even had heavily armored jeeps they climbed into, which looked like European military transports.

"I have one thing to say," Qiana declared. "What the fuck?"


	52. Acquisition 2

A/N: Chap 51 review responses are in my forums like normal. Thanks for reading.

* * *

 **Acquisition 7.2**

"We're working with the fucking Nazi's now?"

Qiana didn't sound pissed—she sounded betrayed. Well, and pissed. Really, really pissed.

"Work with them? Fuck no." Lisa sipped her wine—a Pinot Harry transfigured the night they rescued her. "Fight them? Not if we can help it, not right now."

"Look, Qiana! Look around you."

The pyroclastic cape might not have listened to Lisa, Harry or Taylor, but she listened to Paige. At the older blonde's gesture to the killing field, Qiana looked across the bodies. "Yeah?"

"What would I do, or what would the girls do, if you were out there?"

Harry's respect for Paige shot up yet another level, because while there was not a bit of power in her voice, the power of her words was enough. Qiana's shoulders sank as she considered it.

"The Empire was unmasked right before Leviathan hit," Taylor explained. "They used to play by the unwritten rules, but when Coil released their names and blamed us, they threw the rulebook out. Purity almost killed my Dad and the whole Dockworker's Association. Did you see the way they murdered Mush or Skidmark? We're going to fight them someday, it's inevitable. But when we do, I want to make sure we win without casualties on our side."

"We'll take a vote on it when Little Man gets back," Harry said. "He's one of us, it's only fair."

"And what about us?" Danny asked.

Harry blinked. "What about you?"

"Do we get a vote too?" Phil asked.

"Of course. Why…?"

"Cape business," Lisa said. "Cape rules. You think Marquis or Alfather ever let the non-powered minions have any say?"

Harry ran a hand through his hair. "Are you saying we shouldn't let them have a vote?"

"Hell no. I'm saying we should delegate. Democracies don't always work, especially not when there really is a difference between the influence of one group over another. This is our lair, our building. They're eating food we obtained and saved. Your power created it, we protect it. But the people living here should have input. So, how 'bout they have an election on who should represent them, and whoever's elected sits formally with Coven on any gang-related votes, and they get veto power on anything directly related to the non-powered people other than when it's time for them to leave."

"You guys really do make shitty villains," Phil Lendy said, though he smiled tiredly as he did so. "I think everyone would agree with that. Meantime, what do we do with the bodies? Do we even know how many?"

"You guys go back in," Harry said. "Little Man and the families will be back any minute, you need to finish getting the tents set up for them. Taylor and I will scout around, make sure there aren't any survivors, and then go get the police."

The others shared a few looks before they began to go inside. Harry watched as Paige placed her arm around Qiana's hunched shoulders, kissed her cheek, and led her back inside. Lisa remained with her wine.

"Kaiser's buying time," she said. "He thinks it'll give him an advantage he needs to wipe us out."

"Yeah, not surprising," Harry said. "It'll give us time as well. You okay?"

"Golden. The wine is fabulous. Sorry your cuddle time was interrupted."

Harry felt his cheeks burn, and saw Taylor blushing as well. She met Lisa's gaze, though. "Jealous?"

"A little," the blonde admitted. "Not enough to risk anything for it. Have fun with the police."

With that, Lisa walked back into the lair as well.

"Is it me, or is she still really fucked up about Coil and that bomb?" Harry asked.

"Wouldn't you be?"

"Fuck yeah. So, how many bodies are we dealing with?"

"Ninety-eight bodies," Taylor said without hesitation. With her bugs, she got instant information from across the whole field.

"Bugger me. Why hasn't anyone shown up yet? That wasn't a quiet fight at all."

"Probably scared of us," Taylor said. "I could…I hate saying it, but I could have my bugs clear the bodies. But…"

"Some of these people may have families. The last woman Cricket killed."

"Yeah." Taylor frowned intensely. "Still, shit…oh fuck!"

"What?"

"Someone's still alive in Squealer's rig. They're hurt, bad. I think it might be Squealer herself. Wait—yeah, definitely Squealer."

They made their way over, trying not to look at the bloody carnage Kaiser and his people left. As soon as they reached the monstrous amphibious rig, Harry cast a reveal charm and located the sole living occupant deep within the middle of the construct.

He didn't have the magic to vanish the entire rig in one go, and worried if he vanished it part by part he might finish off whoever was inside. A look at the bodies, though, reminded him of Trickster's power.

Harry cast the reveal charm to get a good grasp on where Squealer was within the vehicle, and cast a switching spell. One dismembered body on the ground suddenly switched places with Squealer. She appeared prone, like the body she replaced. Immediately her eyes latched onto the impaled, motionless figure at the top of the rig.

"Skids," she whispered. She didn't sound good at all, and the dribble of blood down her chin didn't help the initial impression Harry had.

Then he noticed how she was holding her stomach, and a bulge of gray-white intestine that protruded from between her fingers. Tears ran like a flood through the thick cage of black makeup around her eyes as she stared with a hopeless, empty expression at her dead lover.

The stench rising from the woman was not entirely from her unwashed condition. "Holy shit," Taylor whispered.

Kaiser had impaled her through her stomach. Harry could see blood pooling under her in the mud. It was a miracle she wasn't dead yet already. Nor did she seem to care—she simply stared at her lover with a despairing, hopeless expression.

It was the same expression he saw on Taylor's face, when she realized he'd failed to save Grue.

With a twist, he apparated back into the lair. "Panacea!"

"What?" She was standing right beside him and made him jump in fright.

"Shit, don't scare me like that?"

"What? You scared me!"

"Whatever. Come on!" He took her arm and apparated her back to Squealer's side. He noted the Tinker's skin had gone almost blue. Taylor knelt beside her, unsure what to do.

"Ouch," Panacea said, wincing. "Is that…?"

"Yeah."

"Why would you…?"

"Because."

"Oh, fine."

She knelt down beside Squealer. "Do I have your…you know what, fuck it. I don't care, I'm a villain now, and I'm going to fucking heal you whether you like it or not."

"Go Amy!" Harry said.

"Shut up or I'll make you a woman," Amy snapped.

"Then all we'd need is a monorail," Harry said dreamily to Taylor.

Meanwhile, Amy grabbed Squealer's wrist and grimaced. "Good thing she has plenty of fat reserves," Amy muttered.

Harry and Taylor watched, amazed, as Squealer both healed and shrank before their eyes. Even her massive chest shrank to something that was still Penthouse-worthy but more human in scope. But Harry also noticed how the loose flap of flesh in her arms disappeared, and her bulging pot-belly evaporated. Her skin glistened not just with sweat, but what looked almost like glycerin.

"She would've died within three years anyway," Panacea said with more disgust than pity when she stood up. "Kidneys were failing, cirrhosis in her liver, Type II diabetes, heavy, prolonged drug usage. She's going to need one of those cocktails of yours for the drugs, but her body's as good as I can make it. When…shit."

The healer stopped when she saw just how bad the battle was. She looked about the carnage before shaking her head. It was obvious none of the Merchants could use her help. "I'm going back in," she said simply.

Taylor and Harry said nothing, remaining behind with the now gently sleeping, new-and-improved and yet still heart-broken Squealer.

"Wonder how old she is?" Harry muttered.

"What do we do with her?" Taylor asked.

"Well, we sorta saved her, and it's not like there's any Merchants left any more. I figure she's sort of our responsibility now, you know?"

Taylor stared at him with a flat expression. "You're just saying that because you've seen her naked."

Harry ran a hand through his hair and tried to think if that was it. "Look, I'm…I can't…if she were a guy? I say fuck 'em. I just can't do that to girls, Taylor. I just…I can't. The programming's too strong. And her face, when she saw Skidmark…"

Her resolve cracked. "Yeah. So, we secure a room on the second level?"

"Yeah." Harry leaned down, scooped his arms under the tinker, and prepared to lift a heavy woman. He almost stumbled out how light she was. "She must have been really sick," he muttered. With Squealer in his arms, they walked back to their Lair.

"Harry?"

"Yeah?"

"If it comes down to do-or-die, you'd better not let yourself be killed because your opponent has tits."

Harry scoffed. "Course not. I'll go run and hide behind you and Qiana."

Taylor thought about it a second before nodding. "I can live with that." Suddenly she laughed.

"What?"

"It's just…all you've said about all your memories. You've done the same thing. You're surrounded by women!"

"But only one of them is mine," Harry said.

"Yeah, that's the ironic part," Taylor grinned.

"Hm. Yeah, guess so. Wouldn't have it any other way."

"Not even Lisa?"

"She's no fun to argue with."

"Because you'd always lose."

"Before we even got started, even!" Harry agreed.

~~Simurgh's Son~~

~~Simurgh's Son~~

In the normal world, when almost a hundred people lay dead and dismembered in the street of an American city, emergency services would be there within minutes. City officials would declare a mass-casualty incident and coordinate the flow of first responders, triage units, an on-site morgue if necessary, and finally transportation to the nearest hospital.

Harry and Taylor hovered around their ward line for almost half an hour, waiting for a police officer, a national guardsman, a reporter or even a PRT agent to come investigate the open warfare which had rocked the docks. Surely, someone somewhere would deal with the bodies?

After half an hour, though, Harry began to suspect no one was going to come.

"I miss my staff," Harry muttered.

"It'd be nice to fly around to find someone," Taylor admitted. "And I preferred your staff over your teleportation any day. I wonder where it is?"

"Fairly certain Alexandria broke it when they took me into custody," Harry said with a mournful tune. "I made it with my own blood, so a scrying spell should not only find it, but summon it. I couldn't find it anywhere. Which means its broken."

"You can fly without it, though, right?"

"Yeah, it just feels weird," Harry said. "The spell doesn't make me fly like Alexandria, it's a combination of a feather-weight and banishment charm some evil wizard in the past universe came up with to make everyone fear him that much more. Still, you think I should go find someone?"

"Do you want Little Man to lead a bunch of families across that battlefield?"

Harry felt his shoulders sag. "Fine, I'll go. What'll you do?"

"I'll make sure there aren't any other bodies we missed."

"Fine. Kiss for luck?"

To his intense pleasure, she gave him a very long kiss that probably packed more punch than a dose of _Felix Felicis_. "Don't get shot," she said.

"I'm bullet proof," he assured her. "Don't tell your dad we're living together."

"Pretty sure he knows," Taylor admitted. She kissed his cheek then started to head back to the Terrarium. He knew she had her big-assed Darwin bark spiders spinning new a new costume. With a besotted sigh, Harry cast the flight spell and rose up into the air just high enough to make an easy target for a screaming, furious Glory Girl.

 _Figures._

He went streaking back down into the blood-splattered mud while Glory Girl landed on top of him, screaming like a banshee about her sister while she swung punches that would have reduced his head to paste without his runes. He wondered if Taylor would object to him copping a feel. The hero _was_ trying to kill him, after all, and she had a pretty nice body. He knew objectively that doing so would upset his girlfriend. Taylor was very much against any objectification of women, and intellectually Harry _knew_ it was wrong. He didn't objectify Taylor or any of the girls in Coven at all. Mostly. Though he had more than a few dreams about what he saw when he walked in on Paige and Qiana by accident.

"I'm going to fucking rip your head off!" Glory Girl screamed between punches.

Nor did he really objectify Glory Girl as a person. He recognized that she was a person in her own right, who deserved to be respected as such and who was hurting from the loss of her sister. He knew she was not just an object of beauty for a puerile, horny teenaged boy who was raised by a bunch of evil villains who usually made at least some money off not just the objectification of women, but of the overt sale of their sex, whether they agreed to it or not.

"Oh, who am I kidding," Harry muttered.

He vanished her clothes. She kept swinging, which caused her surprisingly small chest to swing in still nice ways. He realized then that she wore a padded bra. A _very_ padded bra.

Mid swing, she realized he suddenly knew she wore a padded bra. She looked down, her grimace of rage turning quickly to horror when she realized that she was stark naked while straddling him. She expressed her new rage by shooting straight up in such as fashion as to confirm she was a natural blonde, then plummeting straight down into his chest so hard it buried him half a foot into the mud.

She then shot back into the sky just as Taylor arrived with a cloud of bugs. "So, you save Squealer but strip Glory Girl naked?" his girlfriend asked. She sounded…tired?

"First, ouch. I mean, ouch." Harry sighed. "I can't move right now. Second, I _can't hit girls,_ " Harry finally admitted. "It's a problem. I admit it. Still, I got rid of her, right?"

"How'd she look?"

"I'd say you really shouldn't feel so self-conscious about your chest."

Taylor stared. "Really?"

"Serious padding in her bra."

She scowled. "Bullshit."

"No, seriously. Next time she tries to kill me, I'll show you."

Shaking her head, Taylor leaned over and helped pull him out of the mud. He was imbedded so deeply it took a minute and a lot of work on her part. His whole body ached as he began casting the cleansing charm over himself. "So…you're not going to yell at me?"

"Harry, she tried to kill you. You're mine. Just…within reason, okay?"

He grinned in relief. "Absolutely. So, you coming with me this time?"

Taylor rolled her eyes. "Absolutely. Tattletale and Panacea are really hard to take together."

"What do you mean?"

"Panacea is a really powerful cape, but she is about the most grouchy, unpleasant person I've ever met outside of the Bitches Three. And Tattletale's been itching for a fight since we saved her. Think about it."

"Right, hunting for the police is better."

They began walking, hand-in-hand like a typical couple. In fact, in casual clothes, they looked just like any other couple as they left their neighborhood. They ended up having to follow the few bull-dozed paths the city had made during the initial rescue operations, since everywhere else that close to the water was covered by dangerous piles of debris. It wasn't an occasional pile here and there—rather it was a consistent coating of detritus with some piles larger than others where buildings collapsed.

Abruptly Taylor stopped. "I have an idea."

"Is that a warning?"

She glared at him. "We go straight to the Mayor's house. We have Dinah back, why don't we invite Mrs. Christner for a tour of Coven, so she can check in with Dinah?"

Harry's first instinct was to kiss her. After he kissed her, his second instinct was to actually think about what she said. Then he kissed her again, because…you know, kisses? "Tell me when you're ready."

"One more kiss," Taylor decided.

After complying, she indicated she was ready. They spun, and a moment later appeared on the porch of the Mayor's house.

Which, while at first glance was an excellent idea, was a plan that would have greatly benefited from some advanced scouting, since the two of them appeared in the middle of about twenty BBPD special weapons officers, a dozen PRT agents, and a fully costumed Triumph speaking with Battery and Assault.

"Well, this is awkward," Harry said. "We'll come back later."

"Wait!" Triumph shouted. "Please, wait!"

Harry didn't quite wait, but didn't return them all the way back to the lair, either. Instead, they apparated across the street from the line of police cars and PRT vans. Casting a _sonorus_ , Harry shouted out, "What?"

His magically enhanced voice made PRT agents reach for their weapons while the police twirled about looking for him. It was Assault in his obnoxiously bright red costume who pointed out where they were. The PRT agents and police started to respond immediately until Triumph called for them all to stand down. The young hero walked down the steps of his parents' front porch and to the fence, though he didn't leave the Christner property.

"We received a report from Exeter last night. About two girls being rescued from heavily armed mercenaries by four capes. Skitter was named directly. Do you…was it Dinah?"

"That was a stupid question, and you should feel ashamed asking it," Harry shouted back.

"Ignore him," Taylor shouted, pausing only long enough to glare at Harry. "Yes, it was Dinah. Coil tried drugging her again, but Panacea and Harry were able to heal her. She's resting. That's why we came!"

"So you could turn her over?"

"Oh hell no," Taylor said. Harry stared, surprised at Taylor's vehemence. "You shits weren't able to keep her safe even _after_ she told you Coil was after her. We were going to invite Mrs. Christner and the Mayor to tour Coven and check on her, and maybe bring her some of her things."

Triumph stared, obviously dumbfounded. Battery stepped down the porch until she joined him at the fence line. "How do we know the mayor would be safe?"

Taylor snorted. "You know, considering we fucking _saved the whole Christner family_ two nights ago, you'd think we'd have solidified our rep a little bit. It's not like we fought off Coil's minions and all of Faultline's crew to save them or anything."

"Oh, before we forget, E88 murdered all of the Merchants right in front of our lair an hour or so ago," Harry called. "We need the police to come do something with the bodies, and notify next of kin and all that stuff."

"Right, this is stupid," Assault declared loudly. He waved dismissively at all the PRT agents and police. "You blokes go…eat a donut or something." He marched down the stairs of the porch, through the gate leaving Assault and Triumph gaping, and crossed the street until he stopped right before Harry and Taylor.

"Nice to meet you. Name's Assault. I'd offer to shake your hand, but none of us are that stupid, right? So, here's the deal. Right after you left night before last, Triumph's girlfriend was shot in the head from a spot probably five blocks away. Expert shot, couldn'a done better myself. So, everyone's up in arms. I get you guys think you're the wronged party, and that you can't trust us. _Believe me_ , I understand misunderstood villains. But the whole Christner family was pretty shaken up, you see, not just by the dead bodies in their living rooms, but by some of the things said."

Harry and Taylor both opened their mouths, but Assault held up a finger. "Shush. Listen to Uncle Assault now. See, thing about conspiracies is, if they're big enough, _anyone_ who learns about them is at risk. Fortunately, the Christner family can't really remember anything that they might have overheard. Because if they did, well, they'd be a liability, right? Those precious girls of theirs might be dead right now. Just like a doctor or nurses in an emergency clinic south of Boston who might have heard too much. So, whatever the fuck you two think you know, just remember you endanger the lives of everyone you blurt it out to until it becomes public knowledge. Capisce?"

Harry felt a hand gripping his almost hard enough to hurt. He looked with concern to Taylor and saw how she'd blanched pale white. "You're saying those people in the clinic are dead because I told them what happened?"

"I'm saying I don't want to know," Assault said. "There's a kill order on you both, but get this? There's also an executive notation on the kill order not to actually enforce it. So, officially you're villains, but unofficially we're not supposed to do anything unless you do something really stupid, like pop up into a whole group of us."

Harry didn't know whether to like or hate the man. It was almost as if he'd found a grown-up version of himself. He wondered if Assault ever pestered Battery to see her chest.

Taylor's death-glare of rage let him know what she thought on the subject. Though he also knew some of that was what she'd just heard. He also knew she needed to hear the other side.

"We refuse to accept responsibility for other people's actions," Harry said. "But we do understand. We'll make sure the whole world knows soon enough. Meantime, the Merchants are dead. All of them. Coven and E88 have worked out a…truce, you might call it. North and south dock neighborhoods and everything north is Coven territory. And we offer a complete truce for all uniformed officials. We need someone to come take care of those bodies, and we promise we won't interfere. Hell, we'll feed anyone who comes by. And once there aren't any bodies in front of the lair, the Christner family is welcome to come visit Dinah."

Assault had a very wide, expressive mouth under his red mask. He grinned at them with a flash of large white teeth. "Now there you go! That's something we can work with. I'll get the word out, and someone from the Protectorate will be with the police to discuss terms of a family visit."

"Just…no Armsmaster, please," Taylor said.

"Yeah, he's an asshole," Harry added. "He's the reason Dinah had to go through Coil's drug torture a second time."

"The bloke was just following orders," Assault pointed out. "Though I have to admit, he is an asshole. Fair enough. I'll consider the PRT and Protectorate under truce with Coven for now. We should be by your place to deal with the bodies in less than an hour. How many did you say?"

"Around a hundred," Harry noted.

Assault's smile dimmed. "That's pretty bad. See you there, then."

With that, the red-suited cape went back to the Christner home while Harry gripped Taylor around the waist in warning, and when she nodded her readiness, apparated them away.

* * *

 _Nobody expects the Spanish Inqui...I mean, the Glory Girl!_


	53. Acquisition 3

A/N Chap 52 review responses are available in my forums as normal. Thanks for reading.

* * *

 **Acquisition 7.3**

Despite their hopes to spare him, George beat the city officials to the lair with over a hundred families from the two closest shelters, most of whom were with the DWA or Magnate Shipping. They saw the bodies, and all looked spooked or even ill when Harry and Taylor returned to the Lair. Still, civilians were Danny and Phil's responsibility.

Instead, Harry and Taylor made their way to the apartments at the end of the lair where they all lived. They found Stephanie and Paige in the kitchen preparing lunch while Qiana sat at the table with the twins in high chairs on either side of her. Baby Peter was riding a little baby back-pack on his mom's back while Stephanie worked, sucking heartily on a pacifier while looking around from the new perspective with interest.

Everyone else was there as well. He noticed Panacea sat at the far end of their oval dining table from Lisa, and was scowling intently as she did so. Lisa looked like she was on her third glass of wine and didn't give a flying rat's ass about anything.

Jess had her wheel-chair up to the far side of the table and was tapping her fingers in a broken rhythm, clearly bored. Dinah sat beside her, pale but smiling faintly at Harry as they arrived. Aisha sat beside Dinah opposite Jess, and looked even more bored than the older girl.

Across from them, George was playing Peek-a-boo with Qiana's girls, which made feeding them difficult. Qiana cared more about their laughing than about how much of their hotdogs and veggie puffs they shoved in their mouths, though, so let it go.

"They're here!" Aisha shouted, far louder than should have been necessary. "Can we eat now, _Mother!"_

Lisa snorted and started to say something when Harry clapped his hands. "So, PRT and police should be arriving soon. Any news on this front?"

"We'll have internet, TV and phone lines by nightfall," Lisa said.

"You got through to the city?"

"No, I bribed Kid Win with porn. He's going to use a tinker tech slice to get us hooked up until the City restores full utilities."

Taylor stared at her. "Kid Win? Porn?"

Lisa laughed grimly. "Tinkers never, ever get girlfriends. I guarantee Armsmaster has never been laid. They're even worse than Thinkers."

"There are children at the table," Paige said as she arrived bearing a platter of deli-style sandwhiches.

"That's right, don't talk about sex and fuckin' and shit like that," Aisha said. "There's kids here."

Dinah snickered.

"Yeah, considering we exposed Vista to Skidmark's great schlong of doom, I think we've already dived off that particular moral event horizon," Lisa said. "Scion rest his drugged-to-hell soul."

"Speaking of…" Harry began.

"Still sleeping," Panacea said. "Whatever that 'potion' of yours is, it works. She'll wake up free of any chemical dependency. That won't change how she feels about losing Skidmark, though. She's going to be a mess."

"Sounds like she'll fit right in," Stephanie said as she slung Peter around to her lap and joined them.

The sandwiches were good, with bread they stole from the alternate dimension they visited so briefly, held in a stasis-charmed box until ready to use. George ate while continuing to play with the girls, while Aisha and Dinah whispered to each other and made funny faces until one or the other cracked up laughing.

With everything they'd gone through—with the seemingly non-stop stress and fighting and fleeing and the mass of bodies just outside their door—Harry could count on his fingers the number of meals they'd been able to share like this even before Leviathan. After, with their three new additions and the kids, it felt special.

"Is this what family's supposed to be like?" he blurted after finishing his second sandwhich.

Conversation sputtered around the table as they looked at him. He blushed a little before finally shrugging. "I don't remember. But it feels like it."

"Yes," Paige said with a gentle, motherly smile. In many ways, she was the group's den mother. "This is exactly what family is supposed to be. We're not always going to agree or be happy with each other. Not all of us will want to stay." She nodded to a now oddly reticent-looking Panacea. "But being together, enjoying each other's company, is what family is about. And it's because of you, Harry. Thank you for saving us from the Birdcage."

"Twice," Lisa noted.

Harry shrugged. "Huh, well, you know, I got the girl, so totally worth it."

Danny knocked at the main door of their apartment before entering the common room. "Am I interrupting?"

"No, come in, Dad," Taylor said. "I think George left a sandwich."

The big brute didn't even blush. He nodded and pointed to the sole sandwich left on the platter nearest him.

Danny laughed as he pulled up a seat to Taylor's right, opposite Harry. "I ate with the folks out there, thanks."

George had the last sandwich on his plate before Danny even finished, much to the laughter of the others.

"Well, I was hoping if you were done we could talk business," Danny said.

"We can eat and talk," Taylor said.

"Good. First, the DWA liked your suggestion, Lisa. Phil and I were both elected to speak for the civilians. They didn't realize that everything here was provided by Coven until Armsmaster forced a lot of them out, and they saw how bad the other shelters were. Those who've come back are very grateful. And with that…the E88 question?"

Harry sighed. "And just like always, Dad kills the mood."

Dinah and Aisha both snickered.

Lisa drained her wine and placed the glass on the table. She'd eaten maybe a third of her sandwich. "The whole thing was a set-up," she said. "Coil told Skidmark where Panacea would be. Then he told Kaiser's people where the Merchants would be, and Kaiser attacked like he did to make a point. He wants the truce because he's hurting. Medhall stocks have plummeted and the whole corporation is about to go into receivership. His personal properties have all been seized, so he has nothing but what he gained illicitly as Kaiser. He wants those six months to play hide-the-Nazi with the IRS and FDA, to reorganize MedHall so he can hide its connections while still getting money, and to get reinforcements from Europe to cover the loss of Purity and her cadre. And he killed a hundred people to sell the idea of his strength to encourage us to agree."

"It was a pretty convincing hard sell," Stephanie said.

"It was bullshit," Qiana said, eyes flashing angrily. "We should have been out there burning them down to ash instead of hiding behind our walls like a bunch of babies."

"E88 isn't like Crane the Harmonious," Lisa said. "Alabaster is functionally immortal—you can burn him to ash and four point three seconds later, he's back up unharmed. And he is a cold-blooded killer. As we all saw. Cricket is the same. So is Hookwolf. They were trained in gladiator-style fighting pits and don't link any value to human life. We can negotiate with Kaiser as long as he thinks he's in a position of power, but the rest are animals."

"I think we should agree because we need the rest ourselves," Taylor said. "We need a chance to get people on their feet. To rebuild. To get Panacea her clinic. I think if we have time to prepare, we have a good chance against them. But only when we're ready. Six months will give us a chance to develop good costumes and armor for us all, and maybe even do some training."

Aisha visibly shuddered when Taylor said the word 'training'.

"The DWA votes for truce, for the same reason," Danny said. "Phil votes the same."

"I vote truce," Stephanie said.

"Truce," Lisa said.

"Truce," Paige agreed.

George shrugged. "Peace is always better. Truce."

"Fight," Jess said. "You can't trust them. Kaiser will violate the truce when we least expect it and stab us all in the back."

"Fight," Qiana said.

"Fight," Aisha said. "I ain't afraid of Nazis."

They all looked at Dinah who stared around the table. "I get a vote?"

"Says the crazy-powerful pre-cog," Harry snorted. "Of course you get a vote, Dinah. You're one of us."

She nodded and nibbled on a potato chip. "There's an eighty five percent chance the truce only lasts two weeks."

"Two weeks is better than none."

Dinah thought about it before nodding. "The odds are better. Truce."

"Truce has it. Are we agreed?" Harry asked.

Everyone around the table, even Qiana, agreed.

"So, we count on betrayal in two weeks and plan accordingly," Lisa said. "That sounds like an excuse for more wine."

"Young lady, I'm certain you're not twenty-one," Danny said. "And I am certain that's your third or forth glass in the past hour."

"Eh, I was threatened with multiple gang-rapes and had an organic bomb put in my skull to force me to work until I almost had an aneurism. I've earned it."

Danny had nothing to say to that.

~~Simurgh's Son~~

~~Simurgh's Son~~

Harry and Taylor didn't bother with costumes when they apparated to Medhall twenty minutes before the two-hour deadline elapsed. The moment they arrived, Taylor saw Harry's eyes latch onto something to her left.

She followed his gaze to the slim girl with honey-wheat colored hair and pale blue eyes with earphones in and music blaring loud enough Taylor could hear it even from the base of the steps leading up into the Pharmaceutical company. She found it odd that a white supremacist was listing to Snoop Dog, but passed it off as experimentation.

Taylor had no idea who was actually running MedHall now that the CEO had been unmasked as a parahuman supervillain, but evidently it still retained its connections. It was also far enough away from the destruction of downtown to only suffered shattered windows and flooding, which from the lines on the masonry went as high as the third floor.

Rune, if it was Rune, was sitting on a stone balustrade that lined the stairs while absently gnawing on an apple. She wore jeans with holes at the knees and a silk blouse that probably cost more than Taylor's entire wardrobe before her world fell apart. For a villainess, the girl was almost as beautiful as Lisa. Taylor hated her instantly.

The hate grew white hot when Harry casually waived at her. "Heya, Hanna. How's things?"

The girl's smile made Taylor very aggressively grab Harry's hand, which only made the girl smile wider. "Not as well as your things, obviously. So, the rumors are true, huh? I thought that video from the Endbringer fight was just nerves or something. You could do better."

Taylor had a fly on the girl's head and a concealed revolver tucked into the back of her jeans. She was seriously about to shoot her, when Harry squeezed her hand. "I don't really think I could."

Hanna clucked her tongue. "I suppose if you're into that sort of thing."

"Definitely am. Tell Kaiser we agree."

Rune, AKA Hanna, shrugged. "You're funeral."

"What's that supposed to mean?" Taylor demanded.

"You got a thinker. Let her figure it out. See ya." She swung down from the balustrade, turned her music up even louder, and walked back into the building.

"I don't like her," Taylor stated.

In a moment of clarity that came rarely, Harry didn't stick his foot in his mouth. Instead, he nodded and said, "I understand. For the record, I could never do better than you."

"Just remember that and we'll be fine."

"Wanna head back?"

With her nod, they apparated directly back to the lair just in time for lunch.

~~Simurgh's Son~~

~~Simurgh's Son~~

"Holy shit."

Captain Johns exclamation was enough to make Police Superintendent Ronnie Jefferson look up from his tablet. He wished he hadn't.

When the orders came down from the Mayor's office, Ronnie's first inclination was simply to refuse. He'd lost almost two hundred men and women during the Leviathan attack, not to mention the police headquarters and two other stations. Their forensics lab and morgue was currently the old Peabody Middle School gymnasium, and there wasn't a single uniformed officer who'd had more than ten hours off since the disaster. They were running on volunteers and state troopers.

They didn't need or want to be involved in cape politics. That was the PRT's venue.

"Problem is, Ronnie, that the PRT has screwed the pooch hard with Coven," the Mayor said. "I'll have someone with you, but I want to open a line of communication with the gang directly. Ronnie—they saved my niece. Not once, but twice. Please, I won't order you. I'm asking you to go, check out the situation, and if you think it's safe let our people handle it."

"You're going to owe me, Roy."

"Ronnie, as soon as that FEMA money hits, I promise your department will be at the top of the funding."

And so Jefferson called out the troops, so to speak. He rode in the second of four patrol cars that escorted their mobile command truck, two CSI teams, and a pair of requisitioned school buses since he'd been told there were quite a few bodies to recover.

Now, having cleared the last pile of debris to get a clear look, he was wishing he'd brought a third. The only time he'd ever seen such carnage was as a young man tasked to assist when the Slaughterhouse Nine hit during the Marquis and Allfather days.

In pristine contrast to the blood and mud of the battlefield, two large buildings dominated the devastated landscape of the Docks neighborhood. The nearest looked almost like a modern crystal megachurch—the structure rose at least three stories high in roughly the shape of a hangar, but one made with exquisite white marble and glass to reveal what looked like a botanical garden inside.

Next to it was a structure of equal size and scope, but with fewer windows and a more solid construction. Despite being right in the path of Leviathan's storm surge, neither showed any sign of damage or even filth, both gleaming in the afternoon sunlight. The juxtaposition with the battlefield was a little unnerving.

Four people were standing between the two buildings, obviously waiting for them.

"Do we go or wait, sir?" Captain Johns asked.

"We wait for the PRT rep."

They didn't have to wait long. Miss Militia rode her Tinker-tech motorcycle carefully over the pitted mud, navigating the piles of debris until she pulled up even with the superintendent. He noticed Johns gaping at the admittedly attractive woman and cleared his throat.

Johns had the grace to blush and stand at attention.

"Superintendent," Militia said with a respectful nod. "I'm not even going to guess what Mayor Christner had to offer you."

Polite, and smart. "I'm sure we'll find out during the city's next budget meeting. I assume you've had dealings with these people?"

She nodded. Behind her mask, he could see her frowning. "Have you ever heard the term, 'There but for the grace of God go I?' I really think, in different circumstances, they would have made the best Ward team in the country. Still, the Mayor asked that the PRT only provide a presence. You are in command, sir."

Police, smart, and _respectful._ Jefferson began to see why his people preferred her over Armsmaster. "Very well. Captain, I'll contact you shortly once I'm assured of our people's safety."

"Sir."

He and Militia began picking their way across the field of carnage. "The Empire 88 did this?" he muttered.

"Normally capes adhere to…unwritten rules," Militia explained. "We have to, we're too dangerous even to ourselves if we don't. Whoever was responsible, when E88 was unmasked, they lost any reason to play by the rules. Something like this will probably result in the Birdcage for them all, if not an actual kill order. The problem is enforcing it. They feel they have nothing left to lose."

Jefferson took a long look at the four waiting for him. He recognized them all just from the news and Wanted Posters. The two youngest were Harry Bailey and Taylor Hebert, aka Mage and Skitter. Unlike their cape posters, the two wore tattered jeans and rather dirty T-shirts. Behind them stood Paige McAbee, aka Canary, whose case even Jefferson had to admit was problematic. The fourth person, though, was the last face he expected to see surrounded by supposedly villainous capes.

"Danny Hebert," he said when they stopped.

"Ronnie," the head of hiring for the Dockworker's Association said. Phil Lendy was the political head of the DWA, but Danny was the actual power behind the DWA, being the one to place the members for work. Then again, it was his daughter he stood behind.

"You sure you're in the right place?"

Danny shrugged. "If you only knew what my girl has gone through…well, let's just say if it were Alicia, you'd be where I am too."

"I suppose I can understand that," Jefferson said.

Canary he knew just from the media. She was a young woman with that ephemeral attractiveness common to entertainers. The yellow feathers served more to accentuate her face than call out the fact that she was a cape. The two kids in front of her, though…

 _These kids killed Leviathan. They killed Legend. My God they're so young._

Hebert and Bailey stood in worn jeans and slightly dirty T-shirts, holding hands. She was actually of a height with Bailey, but at a glance both looked terribly young to have gone through everything they've gone through. Their eyes, though—he'd seen the same expressions on the faces of survivors from the first Slaughterhouse Nine visit. They both had the thousand-yard stare of people who had seen and caused death, despite their youth.

They were powerful enough that between them they could have killed Jefferson and all of his men in mere minutes.

"Mr. Bailey, Ms. Hebert. My name is Ronald Jefferson. I'm the Superintendent of Police for Brockton Bay. I'm here at the personal behest of the Mayor for two reasons. He is under the impression that my people will be allowed to do their jobs without interference from any of you. I understand there's often a difference between what the media says, and what is fact, so I wish to confirm safe passage for my men."

"It's confirmed," Danny's daughter said. "We would have handled it ourselves but…we're certain some of the victims have next of kin or family."

"You saw this happen?"

Bailey grimaced. "One of the Merchants begged Cricket for mercy because of her kids. Cricket took her head off with her kama. Yeah, we saw it."

Militia's scowl was visible even behind her mask. Ronnie simply took it at face value. The anger he saw in the faces of those two kids was too real to fake. "We've had reports that E88 has taken its gloves off since they were unmasked. Will they be a problem?"

He asked Danny, but it was Bailey who answered. "We have a temporary truce. E88 will stay south of the Docks. Everything in the docks and north is ours."

The superintendent pulled a radio receiver from the lapels of his shirt. "We're a go."

Instantly the CSI teams started out across the field.

"The mayor also made another request," the Superintendent said. "We wish to see Dinah Alcott. Danny?"

"Talk to Mage and Skitter, Ronnie. They're the heads of Coven, I'm just here to help them with the civilians."

Bailey shrugged. "Sure, come on in."

Militia and Jefferson both stared. "Just like that?"

The teenaged couple shrugged. Young Hebert said: "Why not? It's not like either of you could hurt us, and we don't want to hurt you. So, come on, we'll give you the five-buck tour."

The four of them led Ronnie and Miss Militia into the more heavily constructed building, using a smaller door rather than a freight door. The first thing Ronnie noted of the interior was how large it was. Two PRT vans and a white suburban barely used any of the floor space. Catwalks framed a second level all around the walls, which shone with wide, tall windows framed by what looked like white marble. The interior glowed.

The second thing he noticed were racks of supplies against the walls, some holding non-perishables, while other racks held what looked like refrigerators. The side opposite the cars held a long, high canvas tent under which he could see a series of gas ovens and stoves. A table ran the length of the tent, and already a few people were working on dinner, from the smell.

"The rest of the civilians are in the lower level," Bailey explained. "We have about twenty school-aged kids here, and four teachers from area schools, so they do classes downstairs. That's where most of the civilians are living now."

"How many civilians do you have here?" Jefferson asked.

"That's my department, I guess," Danny said. "Armsmaster forced most of us into public shelters after Harry and Taylor were sent to the birdcage, but since they returned we've been pulling them back. The facilities here are just better. Right now we're up to about five hundred people. We expect another four or five hundred from Magnate to join us. Fortunately most of the Seaboard Rail people's neighborhoods were spared, but a lot of our homes were destroyed."

"And Coven lets you stay?"

"Before Leviathan Coven had a security contract with the DWA, Magnate and Seaboard Rail," Taylor explained. "We were the ones who captured the Merchants before Leviathan. Part of the contract provided use of our facilities as a shelter, since this building could possibly have stopped Leviathan directly. We had over three thousand before Armsmaster forced them out."

"Do you need any supplies?" Miss Militia asked.

The three young people shared suspicious smirks. "I think we're good for now," Bailey finally said.

They continued to lead Ronnie and Miss Militia across the vast floor to a set of modern apartments that took up the far end of the structure. Inside, Jefferson found himself in a large common room furnished with modern sofas, a dark but huge wide-screen television, several end tables and a very large oval dining room table. Opposite the table was a nearly industrial-sized kitchen with three sets of stoves, two separate sinks and two large refrigerator/freezer units.

Dominating the floor of the common room, Jefferson saw two toddlers in pull-ups playing patty-cake with the Mayor's niece under the careful supervision of a notorious Birdcage escapee named Smolder, while another escapee named Schism, who single-handedly killed a dozen students in her California high school, sat cross-legged on the floor helping a mixed-race baby walk.

If he were not staring at two of the most wanted criminals in the country, he might think he'd stumbled onto one of his own kids' playdates when they were younger.

Dinah looked…too thin. There were shadows under her eyes, and though it pained Ronnie to see it, she had the same thousand-yard stare Bailey and Hebert did. She was a child of violence, for better or worse. And yet, she was laughing and playing with the little girls to their mutual delight. Every time she lost, she'd poke one of the twins in the stomach, eliciting squeals of laughter.

"Babies?" Militia asked.

"Born in the Birdcage," Taylor said. "Born in a prison they can never escape."

Militia visibly paled. "No…" she whispered.

"What'd you expect?" Harry said. "It has no guards. There's no exit. Acidbath breeched the wall between the genders, and trade went from there. The less powerful women are sold to the more powerful men. Schism there is an example. Doesn't even know who the father is, not that it matters. Peter's a Coven baby now. There were others, but we couldn't trust the mothers. Schism and Smolder there were victims of a broken, corrupt PRT, just like us. And that's why Coven will not deal with the PRT, Miss Milita. The corruption in your organization goes all the way to the top."

"But we will deal with the city," Taylor said. "Superintendent, Coven stands ready to assist the city in any way we can. If you have a cape problem, we'll help you. If you need our power for public works, we'll help. I can provide the best pest service you can imagine for city buildings. Harry can place magical wards to protect city buildings. We want to buy all the property around us to establish working docks, and a ferry. We'd even build a school and apartments. All we ask is that you keep the PRT out of it. Because for every Miss Militia in the PRT, you have a Coil too. And we're not going to work with liars, cheats and murderers."

If Jefferson didn't know better, he could have sworn Miss Militia looked sick. She didn't say a word, though, to her credit.

Dinah, meanwhile, had noticed them and stood up from the two toddlers. The obvious twins climbed up and followed after. "Where you go, Dine? Where you go?"

She paused and looked up at Ronnie. She'd not grown much since he saw her, but her smile seemed free enough. "Hello, Mr. Jefferson," she said.

She was tall enough he could bend down greet her face to face without having to kneel. "Hello, Dinah. How are you?"

"Better, now. Panacea healed me, and Harry gave me a magic potion that washed away all of Coil's drugs. He still had some from the first-time Coil tried drugging me."

Ronnie's heart ached. "I'm glad to hear that," he said. "Sweetie, I have to ask. Are they treating you oaky? Did you want to…"

Dinah vehemently shook her head. "No, no Mr. Jefferson. No. This is my home. Every time I leave, family dies. I'm too powerful, too many people want me. Harry and Taylor are the only ones who can protect me. And…and it's…well. I don't like having to go to school again. I get that, though. But Miss Martin lets me play with Bea and Tea all the time, and Aisha's my best friend now. She tried to save me from Coil and he shot her, and she still stayed my friend! So I don't want to go. This is my home. This is my family now."

Jefferson nodded. "Okay, Dinah. Is it okay if your aunt and uncle visit you?"

She lit up like a bulb. "That'd be great. Can Kyla come to? I can show her my room, or the garden. Harry has a real witches garden. His plums float in the air like blimps! And his mandrakes look like little people, but you gotta where earmuffs or they'll kill you when you pull them out of the ground."

"I'll have to check and see," Ronnie said. "I'm glad you're doing better, Dinah."

She gave him a hug. Then grinned. "Eighty-nine percent chance Alicia gets into Brown if she applies," the girl told him. "She doesn't think she could, so she wasn't going to apply."

With a last squeeze, she backed away from the startled Superintendent before turning to the girls. "Race you!"

The girls shouted their approval and proceeded on a very slow, circuitous race around the living room, accompanied by shrieking giggles.

"See what you needed to see, Ronnie?"

Ronnie turned to see Danny studying him intently. "Yes, I think I have. How should we contact you to arrange the Mayor's meeting?"

Danny handed over a slip of paper. "Our satellite number. We should have something better soon, but for now that's the best way to call. Please don't share it with the PRT. As my kids told you…the PRT are not welcome here. Not after what they did to my girl. Or to Harry."

"You sound like he's yours."

Danny shrugged. "He's Taylor's, that makes him mine too. I hope to talk to you soon, Ronnie."

"I believe you will."


	54. Acquisition 4

Chap 53 review responses are in my forums like normal. Thanks for reading.

* * *

 **Acquisition 7.4**

Sherrel Bailey woke in a white-walled room whose only decoration was a plain, full-sized bed and a window. There was a bathroom attached with a toilet that had no water connections but still flushed, a sink and vanity that had no pipes but worked fine, a shower stall and a bathtub.

She wore a pair of boxer shorts that were most definitely not hers, and a flannel pajama top.

Though she tried, Sherrel couldn't think of any words to describe how she felt. She didn't have the shakes which would have meant she needed another dose of whatever shit Skids had on him. She didn't have that queasy feeling that meant she'd done too much and needed to puke, nor the ache after her last miscarriage. In fact, she didn't have anything to complain about physically.

 _Nothing hurt._

She stood from the bed and walked bare-foot across the cold floor until she stood in the bathroom before the mirror. Wordlessly, she slipped off her pajama top and the ugly-assed plaid boxers and stared at a stranger.

The reflection was Sherrel, but not Squealer. Sherrel was the sixteen-year-old who ran away from her abusive dad. Newly triggered without a clue, she made her first monster bike out of one of her dad's abandoned cars in front of the trailer in Alabama. She drove away and never looked back. Until Skids founder her, that is.

He took her in. Fed her. Fucked her hard and jacked her full of shit. She tried running at first, but the shakes got too bad and she had to go back for more. After a while, she told herself she liked the fucking, and even if she didn't it was worth it for the highs, and to keep the shakes away. He let her build what she wanted, and she pretended she had it okay. Skids was known. He was safe, because she knew he'd hit but never kill. He needed her too much. She was mostly safe.

Until Kaiser.

The door of the main room opened and a kid walked in on her. His eyes bulged. "Holy fuck, I…sorry." He covered his eyes, blushing like Toby from high school did whenever she showed him some of the raunchy comic strips she'd drawn. Before. _Before._

"What, you never seen tits before?" she asked.

"Er, no, I've even seen yours. I'm Mage. We were the ones that caught you the first time."

"Right." She didn't bother covering up—Skids had shown her off and given her away to favored Merchants so much she didn't even think about it. "So, what? Gonna keep me prisoner until I build shit for you? That's what gangs do with enemy tinkers, isn't it? Gonna pimp me out? What's it gonna be?"

"Er, actually I was just bringing you dinner," the kid said. "I'm…look, Taylor will really get on my case if she knows I'm hanging out in here with you naked. Could you maybe put your shirt back on or something?"

She sighed but put on the flannel shirt. She smirked and left the boxers off and the shirt unbuttoned. Her body was the only weapon she had at the moment, and she fully intended to use it. "Happy now?"

He turned and blushed a little more. "Man, that's even worse. You know, this sucks. I've seen more naked women since I've been off the market than I ever got to see when I was single. You can't imagine how much that sucks."

"Why let that stop you? Wanna fuck, I'm right here?"

"Er, no thank you? Um, I'm in a committed relationship. Also, she controls bugs and I'm pretty sure she'd make cockroaches eat my prostate if I cheated on her. She even told me that one time."

"You're cute, kid. Dumb, but cute. So, what's the deal? Why'd you heal me?"

"Mainly because it was the right thing to do?" He didn't sound sure himself. "Look, none of the others are really interested. We've all had bad shit happen to us, in piles of it, really. That's why I'm in here instead of one of the girls. I just really think people should get a second chance, you know? You're safe here. No one's going to ask you to…do things. Not here, not us. Hell, there are only two guys anyway. Coven's mostly girls. And babies. Can't forget the babies."

"So, I can leave?"

He stammered a minute before shrugging. "Yeah, I guess so. You should have a bath first, though. No offense, but Panacea pulled some nasty stuff out of your body, and I can still smell it on your skin. Soap and shampoo and conditioner are all there."

"You're saying I stink?"

"Honestly? You do. Really bad. Yeah. I mean, you're still hot, no doubt. But even Taylor stinks after a work-out, it's just what it is."

"Stop, kid, I get it. If my tits and pussy bother you that much, get out or jump in."

He visibly swayed. "I'm good. Bye!"

As he walked away, she heard him muttering, " _Bad Mage. Bad Mage. Don't think of the Tinker tits. Anything but the tinker tits!"_

Sherrel couldn't help but laugh, though the sound was short lived. She touched a red button by the bathtub, expecting water to come out. Instead, the tub was instantly filled with steaming water.

"Huh. Neat." She was a tinker—she'd seen stranger. The water was so hot it almost burned, but she slipped in slowly anyway, sighing as the heat enveloped her until it was up to her neck.

She hadn't settled long before someone else walked in.

"You kids don't go for the whole privacy thing, do you?" she joked.

"You flashed my boyfriend," came the response. "I think you might have broken him."

The girl who came in was skinny, all limbs and joints that would turn to elegance once she had a kid or two. Short black hair held just the hint of a curl. She had a long face with a wide mouth. She wore jeans and a T-shirt that revealed she didn't have much in the way of assets. No wonder her boy had a hard time keeping his eyes of Sherrel's chest.

"So whatch'ya want, sweet cheeks?"

Ten very big, mean-looking wasps flew in and hovered a foot away from Sherril. She went still, barely willing to breath. Not only was she deathly afraid of bugs in general, she was allergic to wasps in particular.

"I want to set some ground rules," the girl said. She sat on the edge of the tub. "Maybe get to know you a little. See, Harry? He's got this girl-saving thing. I don't understand it, but it saved my life more than once, so I'm not going to judge when he brings home stray pets. It's my job to decide if the pets stay or not."

"I'm not your fucking pet."

"No, you were Skidmark's, and that makes you a risk. You see, I'd die for Harry. I'd do anything for him. And if I had to, I'd kill you and have my bugs eat your body before I allow you to hurt him at all. If you understand that, and stop flashing him, I think we might get along."

"What, don't think you can keep him?"

"I think he's a stupid, horny sixteen-year-old boy who just got an eye full of…ok, I admit…impressive breasts. But see, that's what's wrong. You should be a beautiful woman, but Squealer isn't beautiful. She's ugly, and stupid, and vicious."

At any other time of her life, Sherrel would have laid into the young bitch and told her she could go fuck herself with a power washer. But at that moment, up to her chin in the first hot bath she'd had in as long as she could remember, without any shakes or pain, she found she just didn't have the fire to do it.

"I get it. Hands off your boy."

The girl nodded. "My name is Taylor. That was Harry, before. You know us as Mage and Skitter. Coven is offering you shelter from E88 for now. We're not going to hold you prisoner, but we won't let you stay either if we believe you're a risk."

"I ain't gonna do anything," Sherrel muttered.

"Do you have any family? Anyone you want to contact?"

"Fuck no!"

Taylor nodded. The wasps, Sherrel was happy to note, flew up and perched on the wall. Taylor stood and walked over to a narrow shelf on the other side of the shower stall before returning a moment later with a cheap plastic pitcher, a wash cloth and a handful of bottles.

"Well, let's start with that hair," Taylor declared.

"What?"

The answer was a pitcher of hot water in her hair. Sherrell sputtered indignantly when she felt strong, soothing hands rubbing shampoo into her long, greasy blonde hair. She thought about hitting the hands away, but the truth is it just felt too damn good. The girl had magic hands. It took two shampoos to get the oil and filth out.

She took a wash cloth and scrubbed Sherrel's back, just like her mom used to do when she was a kid. Before Dad really started drinking.

"You're on your own up front," Taylor said. She didn't smile much, but Sherrel could hear the hint of one in her voice. "No need to give Harry any more wank material."

Sherrel snorted as she washed herself. It was weird, washing next to this skinny, flat-chested girl. It was almost like when she was a kid with her mom, _before._ "So, you come in, threaten me to keep my hands of your boy, and now you're being nice and shit. Why?"

Taylor shrugged. "Worst day of my life, when my mom died, Dad crawled into a bottle and didn't come out again for a year. Second worst day of my life, and he didn't know how to handle it. Third worst day of my life? Harry killed Lung and Acidbath and bullied his way through the whole fucking Birdcage to find me. Three worst days of my life, and the one I got over fastest from was when I had someone there who actually cared. Say what you will, Sherrel, yesterday was a pretty shit day for you."

Sherrel wanted to snort or make a joke about it, but she couldn't, because the girl was right. It was a shit day, just as bad as the day she triggered. Little sixteen-year-old Sherrel would have cried about it. Twenty-year old Sherrel found herself going very still as a gentle, strong hand rested against her back, rubbing it just like her mom used to.

"Skids was shit." It felt odd to say it aloud. But with the words, suddenly it felt like a weight was lifted. "He took a runaway Southern girl, fucked her up and got her hooked on meth. Just so he'd have his own tinker to fuck. Made him feel strong."

"And you didn't run, because there was nowhere else to go."

Sherrel nodded and wiped sweat from her face. "Never is."

Taylor leaned over and touched the white button between the red and blue. Abruptly the water was gone. Didn't drain, it was just gone. And Sherrel didn't give it a second thought, because she could make trucks that could fly and go invisible. Instead, she stood and awkwardly let the girl put a towel around her shoulders. Only standing did she realize Taylor was taller than she was by a good two inches.

"You're boy do stuff like this for you?"

"All the time. With a big goofy grin on his face."

"You're lucky."

"Now, maybe I am." She stepped back to let Sherrel finish drying herself. Back in the main room, the door was safely closed and clothes were laid out on the bed. Nothing fancy—a pair of nice fitted Dickey's, a black bra and a black pullover…blouse. Sherrel couldn't remember the last time she wore a blouse.

Taylor took the towel back into the bathroom while Sherrel dressed, and then they spent another ten minutes conditioning and combing her hair. "Harry brought you a sandwich, but one of the girls made a really good potato chowder and cornbread if you'd prefer to eat with us."

Sherrel's stomach growled. Painfully loud. "Chowder sounds good," she admitted nervously.

"Come on, then."

The whole place looked like some fucking fancy Swedish motel. White walls, lots of windows. Carpet down the hallway. No pictures on the walls or anything, but the whole place looked and felt clean and foreign to anything she'd ever known.

She heard the voices first as they walked down well-lit stairs. Talking and laughing. Kids voices. A little girl shouting, "Gimme, momma! Gimme!" A baby fussing. It sounded more like a family gathering than a villain gang.

They emerged into a long, brightly lit room with high ceilings. A group was crowded around a large oval wood table filled with food. She saw immediately that most of the people there were women, except for the kid, Mage, and a huge black kid with a sweet smile and a big pitcher of beer in front of him. They had a wheelchair girl, too. The whole gamut. And they were talking and laughing like it was the most ordinary thing in the world.

"Oh, girl cleans up good!"

Sherrel stopped in her tracks as one of the women left the table and just walked right up to her.

"Shit, bitch, you're like a whole new girl, ain't yeah? Come on, we got a seat for you. Told Harry a sandwich wasn't gonna do after you got healed by Panacea. Shit makes you hungry."

Sherrel was pulled in the woman's wake as much as she followed of her own volition. She noticed Taylor cross to the other side of the table and sit by Harry. He grinned at his girl like a puppy at a bone, and she knew in that instance that even if she'd have locked the door and used every move she had, she'd never get him to look at her the way he looked at his Taylor.

There was a seat for her. They didn't have to move over because they'd planned on her being there. Wheel chair girl passed over a big bowl of chowder, while the brunette juggled her baby boy in one hand and passed a pan of cornbread over.

They finished with a glass of tea.

"Do you…I mean, um…"

"My names' Qiana. And you need to eat, girl." She was loud, but there was kindness in the words. Protectiveness. "We got it, we understand. Me? Birdcaged as a teen. Steph there? Same. We've been there. We get it. We don't judge for what you been through, 'cause we been through it too. While you're here, if you stay off the shit? We'll do just fine."

"Harry saw her naked."

Sherrel blinked. It was a little girl, no more than eleven or twelve, and she wasn't grinning at Sherrel. She was grinning at Harry's blushing face.

"I didn't mean to!"

"Yeah, that's what you said when you walked in on me'n Paige, you fucking perve," Qiana said. She tossed a piece of corn bread at him, which bounced off his face and into his chowder. He shrugged and mixed it in.

"I'm still sorry about that."

"No, you're not." That was the pretty blonde with the feathers in her hair sitting next to Qiana. Paige. "You're sorry we were upset at you. You're not a bit sorry you saw us."

Harry buried his face. Taylor grinned at the blonde before taking a bite of his chowder.

"You guys always like this?" Sherrel asked, trying to find some safe footing.

"When we're not being hunted by the Protectorate or attacked by the other gangs or fighting Endbringers, yes." That was another blonde. She could have been almost as pretty as Feathers, but instead she looked like shit, with rings under her eyes that made her look old and exhausted. "And believe it or not, Harry has saved each one of us. He saved Taylor and me from Bakuda, then from Coil. He saved us and Paige there from the Birdcage the first time. Stephanie and Qiana he saved with all of us from the Birdcage a second time. He and Taylor have saved Dinah from Coil twice. He didn't save Jess outright, but she's sheltered in the lair here that he created."

"He didn't save me!" That was the drop-dead gorgeous teen with the mocha eyes and the purple and white stripes in her hair. "I was gonna fuck him up, but then I realized he wasn't too bad. Taylor—she's the one saved me and Dinah second time from Coil. She and Steph and Qiana and George there."

"And we all saved Panacea from her own fucked up family," the tired-looking blonde said.

At the far end of the table, the afore-mentioned Panacea sighed. "Yes, Lisa. You've only reminded me four times today. Squealer, you need to…"

"Sherrel."

"What?"

"My name…Sherrel. Sherrel Bailey."

"Hm, pretty sure we're not related," Harry said. "With the whole being English thing. Still, glad to have you with us, Sherrel."

"I…right. Er, thanks." She took a bite of the chowder, and lost track of all conversation as she let the bliss of it fill her up. Two bowls later, the aching hunger pain she hadn't even realized existed was gone and she could sit back and simply rest and not think as people talked around her. It felt almost like she belonged there.

They weren't talking like the Merchants ever talked. They were talking about trying to help people—about how they could use their powers to make new docks and buildings, or a clinic for Panacea. About apartments and factories and what to do with all the trash and the huge ships that'd washed up. About how Schism could split the hulls of the beached ships from the boat graveyard into plates, and wasn't it a damn shame they didn't have better recycling because of all the stuff spread everywhere.

And then they weren't talking anymore because Sherrel was humming loudly as she scribbled over a big piece of white board with a pencil, neither of which she remembered asking for, but it didn't matter, because damn fucking shit a big trash-eating monster truck was just about the awesomest thing she'd thought of in ages.

She finally got it down before looking up and frowning at everyone. "What?"

They weren't making fun of her, she didn't think. Instead, the second-prettiest blonde, whose name was Lisa, stood and walked around the table until she stared down at the scrabbles. "Taylor, get your dad. He needs to see this."

"Why?"

"Because the newest member of Coven has just designed a mobile, universal recycler."

Taylor's eyes bulged for a moment before she nodded and left he table at a trot. Harry grinned and made a show of looking around the table. "I told you we needed a tinker."

Sherrel looked around, confused by not scared. "I don't get it."

The tired-looking blonde put her hand on her shoulder. "It means your home, Sherrel. You're not a prisoner, you're our sister. Welcome to Coven. You now have voting rights, and the right to throw things at Harry when he starts perving."

~~Simurgh's Son~~

~~Simurgh's Son~~

"Are you sure about this Roy? It seems like we're driving into the lion's den. These…people are terrifying!"

Roy Christner regarded the two councilors he'd roped into the meeting with a wry smile. "They're teenagers for the most part, Marcia."

Marcia Culpepper was a mother of four, grandmother of ten, and a four-term member of the Brockton Bay City Council. She sat on the budget committee for the latter two of those terms. She was also one of the most vocal critics of the Protectorate ENE and Director Piggot individually for the continued existence of the Empire 88.

"They're teenagers who killed an Endbringer and levelled half of downtown," Councilor Curtis McMann noted. While Marcia had two chins under her iron-gray hair, Curtis had no chin, and hardly any hair. Next to Marcia he looked pale and washed out. He was also a retired Air Force Colonel and another vocal critic of the PRT.

Roy's original plan was to bring his wife and daughter Kyle to meet with Dinah. That plan got about as far as his wife's foot before being booted out to sea with a long, eloquent explanation of why he would sooner find himself divorced than have his daughter in a den of murderers and thieves. She firmly believed that it was Coven who killed Samantha in their living room, and Roy wasn't going to risk his family to correct her understanding.

If he couldn't make it a family affair, then he'd make it a business one.

"Think of it this way," Roy said. "You spoke to Bill Perkins and Belinda Barton. More telling, Phil Lendy and most of the DWA are still sheltering with them. I know you have sometimes locked horns, but do you think those three would really support murderers and monsters?"

Their limo hit another huge pothole, bouncing the three of them, before suddenly smoothing out. They were well into their third week since Leviathan. They'd managed to restore utilities to half of the city, but their reconstruction efforts had been hampered by constant attacks from E88 and other capes they'd not been able to identify yet.

Despite Marcia's and Curtis's complaints, Roy knew the PRT was being run ragged trying to stop them. The E88 simply had more, and more powerful, capes.

"Feels like we finally got some pavement down," Curtis noted.

Roy frowned because that most definitely wasn't the case. The car came to a stop and a moment later their driver Chuck got the door. Marcia was first out, followed by Curtis and then Roy himself. The two police escorts had remained in front and behind the mayor's custom Escalade.

According to the Superintendent Jefferson, the grounds surrounding Coven's lair was a bloody, muddy mess piled high with not just debris, but a beached cargo hauler from the ship's graveyard.

What he saw now was a plaza paved in meter-diameter hexagonal basalt pavers fitted together so closely as to not need mortar. They extended from where the cars parked all the way to the bay. On the water's edge, they saw huge pillars of steam rising into the air and obscuring distant figures.

A pair of familiar men were walking toward them. Both wore clean, informal clothes—slacks and relatively well-fitted button-up shirts and ties. No jackets, though given the unseasonably warm spring as they crept up into June, and given that they hadn't had opportunities to shop freely, it was understandable.

"Roy, a pleasure to see you again," Phil Lendy said. "Marcia, Curtis, a pleasure to have you here as well. Thank you for coming.

Phil was the political side of the DWA, and he showed it with firm handshapes and projected sincerity in his smile. He knew every member of the city council, their families, and their voting histories. Danny Hebert, behind him, was more restrained in his smile, but his handshake was just as firm. "A pleasure to have you."

"You've done a lot here, gentlemen," Roy noted, spreading his hand across the beautiful paving. It didn't extend very far to the south, admittedly, ending at a huge pile of debris and the beached hauler, but the achievement was still astonishing.

"We haven't done a thing, Roy," Phil said. "The paving is the work of a young cape named Qiana Martin—a former unjustly imprisoned Birdcager that Mage and Skitter saved, along with her two baby girls who were born and lived in the prison with her."

He smiled as he said it, to express what a good thing it was, but the implication made Roy's stomach drop.

 _Of course there would be children in a prison that held male and family prisoners, but had no exits or guards. We just never bothered to think about it._

His pondering was interrupted by a monstrous, mechanical roar and a round of cheering. The three couldn't see specifically what was causing the noise, since it was coming from behind the massive ship laying on its side in the debris.

"That's our recycling unit," Danny Hebert explained. "Coven recruited a Tinker a few days ago, and the first thing she built was a universal recycler. Metal, plastic, paper, even glass. What it doesn't recycle it consumes as a fuel source. Sounds like they just got it up and running. It's slow, but even so it'll speed up the debris removal a thousand times at least. So, are you ready to meet the heads of Coven and tour the facilities?"

The two men led their guests to the first of the two impressive buildings. The ten-foot tall glass and platinum double-doors opened to reveal—teenagers. Roy recognized Danny's girl from the fight at his house, though he had to admit she looked better without the helmet and visors that she wore with her pilfered PRT gear. She was wearing loose navy blue slacks and a creamy blouse. She wore a simple silver chain around her neck with a large, admittedly spectacular diamond. Her dark hair, while short, was long enough to develop curls around her neck.

Beside her stood a teen not an inch taller than her. His hair was darker than hers—a true black as opposed to her brunette. He wore khakis and a simple button down. Given their circumstances, their clothes were probably as good as they could get.

Phil did the introductions. "Mr. Mayor, Councilors, this is Harry Bailey and Taylor Hebert, two of the three who head Coven. Taylor, Harry, may I introduce City Councilors Marcia Culpepper and Curtis McMann?"

The two teens shook hands like perfectly ordinary people. "No Kyla?" Taylor asked the mayor.

"My wife wasn't comfortable with the idea."

Rather than been upset, Taylor merely nodded. "Given everything that's happened, I understand. Dinah told me this morning the odds were against seeing her cousin, but she chose to hope anyway. Well, since you're here, please come in. We'll start with the Coven Gardens."

"We use to call it the Terrarium," Harry added. "But the group voted for the Gardens instead. Easier to say."

All of them had to stop just inside as the sheer _enormity_ of the place struck them like a blow. Roy didn't pretend to be an engineer, but it didn't take a degree in rocket science to know that the length of the building he was looking down was at twice that of the outside dimensions.

"It's okay to say it," Harry said with a smirk.

"It's bigger on the inside," Marcia said.

He clenched a fist and jerked his arm as if he'd just scored a touchdown. "Yes! I had reason recently to expand my personal gardens beyond what Taylor was doing with her insect populations." He pointed to balconies lined in exquisite platinum rails that ran the length of each wall fifteen feet above the ground level, which itself looked like a botanical garden with trees and shrubs and an almost deafening level of insect chatter.

That _instantly_ stopped. "Sorry," Taylor said. "The bugs get loud sometimes."

" _You_ did that?" Curtis asked.

"My power allows me to control all arthropods. Harry built the gardens mainly for my bugs, but then he's also expanded his garden as well for other purposes."

"Just imagine what she could do for pest control." Danny noted.

"How…" Roy tried not to smile as he watched his old friends flounder for words. Finally, Marcia was able to find what she wanted to say. "How did you make all this?"

Bailey shrugged. "Magic."

"Your power is to make buildings?" Curtis asked, confused.

"No, my power is magic. I'm not a cape. I don't have the structure in my brain all other capes have. I'm a Mage. A wizard. I converted old, rundown warehouses into structures that could survive an Endbringer attack by channeling my magic through a construct of magical runes, which I keyed to continue absorbing the ambient magic of the earth. These buildings will likely stand, and have power, for centuries."

"It's a long story, and he's not going to tell it because we don't want to terrify you or challenge your beliefs," Taylor said with a shushing glare at Harry. "What we want out of this meeting is an understanding. Coven are labelled as villains because the PRT decided to make us villains. When just framing us for murder didn't work, the PRT managed to forcibly compel us to kill. But if you look at what we've actually done as capes, you'll find we are not criminals."

"We don't push drugs," Harry said. "Unless you count my wine. But I don't think alcohol produced by underage people counts."

"We don't enslave or prostitute anyone," Taylor said. "Our goal was to try and make the city better. But every time we tried, either other gangs or the PRT itself would attack us."

"So we've given up on the Protectorate and the PRT." Harry looked intently at the Mayor, then the two councilors. "We want to contract directly with the city. Our tinker has developed a universal recycler. One of our capes is out there, even as we speak, rebuilding a pier for shipping. Another of our capes is going to start carving up the beached ships, and when she's done we'll clean out the graveyard."

"We're going to help Panacea open a clinic," Taylor said. "Her own mother had her in a shock collar working as a slave in Brockton Memorial. We freed her, and we're not going to let New Wave throw a collar on her again, ever."

"We'd like to buy the docks," Harry said. "We don't have much money, yet, but we believe that with grants from the city we could revitalize the entire area. We can open up shipping again and rebuild the piers. New schools and shopping areas. We don't want to push crime, we want to provide valuable services. We want to make things better."

"So, how about the rest of the tour," Phil Lendy said, breaking the mood. "And then lunch. I understand Canary is a pretty skilled cook."

As they continued walking through the gardens, with the two teens explaining everything around them, Roy lingered back to meet Danny Hebert's eyes. "The DWA?"

"On board one hundred percent," Danny said. "Hell, most live here. Roy, that pier will be ready to receive ships tomorrow. You won't have to worry about gangs hitting convoys into the city—that's why E88 wanted to get a truce—they wanted to get access to all the routes into Brockton Bay from Boston. With the pier open, you can bring supplies in by ship with built in cape protection. What they're talking about…Roy, it could remake Brockton Bay the same way Legend helped remake Brooklyn."

"A lot to think about."

"They tend to make me do a lot of that," Danny agreed with a smile. They continued on the tour of Coven.


	55. Acquisition 5

A/N: Chap 54 review responses are in my forums like normal And a note on this chapter-some folks have commented that they want to see "reaction" chapters, or get an idea what's going on outside coven. Truth is, I personally don't like chapters like that unless they can advance the plot. This chapter, though, was always meant to give that outside perspective. To let people see how the world views Coven while advancing the plot. It's not action driven, but is itself a major turning point for the story.

* * *

 **Acquisition 7.5**

"Director, you're ten o'clock is here."

Director Rebecca Costa-Brown frowned without letting the expression affect her tone. "Thank you, Andy. Send him in, please."

She stood and stepped around her desk to show proper deference. She knew how to play the game well, having done it for decades. The man who walked in looked old enough to be her father—was in fact a few years older than her father. Warren Stillwater was the second longest serving senator on the Hill, having represented New Hampshire for almost forty years.

He was also the chairman of the Parahuman Affairs Committee and one of the PRT's most vocal champions.

"Warren, wonderful to see you," Rebecca said with a forced smile and an offered hand.

The senator accepted both with the confidence of a life-long elected official. Like all long-term elected officials, he carried himself with the casual confidence that came from believing he operated with his constituents' mandate. "Rebecca, you're looking lovely as always."

She led him to her small conference table. She had coffee brought up before he arrived and prepared two cups now—he preferred his black and neat, a holdover from his Army days. Stillwater was a Vietnam vet, from the last major American war fought before the Endbringers arrived.

He nodded his thanks as Rebecca sat down opposite, her back to the walls of the Potomac. "How are your girls?" Rebecca asked.

"Oh, they're doing just fine," the old senator said. "Alicia was just made a senior analyst and is in line to land her own portfolio."

Rebecca nodded. "Her company has certainly done well with my funds." Commonality. She invested with his daughter's company through the PRT's 401(k) plan. Just enough, that is, to be able to claim that connection. She'd have chosen another company if not for the fact Stillwater's daughter worked there.

Warren nodded and sipped his coffee. His smile looked pleasant enough, but his body language communicated tension. Perhaps fear. Her mind began to race, surging forward as it collected and processed data on par with a typical super computer.

"How do you do it?" he finally asked. "How do you move from DC to Los Angeles so fast? I'd always had my suspicions, but I couldn't get past the geography. Alexandria is seen in Los Angeles daily. And you're here."

 _He knew. The entire operation was at risk._

Options began running through her mind in a never-ending logic-tree, weighing action and consequence. Kill him and feign an attack from Coven, or the Slaughterhouse? Blackmail him from the pictures of his affair ten years ago? Threaten his children?

The possibilities played through her mind, until a stark, painful memory interrupted her train of thought.

She remembered her old friend, one of the few she had left from when she accepted Cauldron's proposal. He glared at her, his whole-body trembling in a rage she'd not even seen in him when facing the Slaughterhouse Nine.

" _We failed him_ ," Legend had said, nearly shouted. " _Again and again. He doesn't trust me because he shouldn't. We're so caught up in percentages and odds that we've lost sight of the Individual. That one stubborn bastard who will simply stand up and say, 'I prefer not to.' And given powers, all it takes is one individual to change the world. For the better or not_."

She stared now at this father and grandfather, a man she'd worked with for ten years, and realized she preferred not to pursue any of the options her powers told her would save the hour. She didn't _want_ to kill him, no more than she _wanted_ to kill Legend.

She hadn't cried since Hero died. Suddenly, she felt a surge of grief that forced her to her feet. She turned away from Warren and stared out across the gray, rain-soaked landscape of the capital as her good eye burned. The false eye she wore, the one Siberian ripped out, could not produce tears any more.

Stillwater had not moved from his seat. Instead, he sipped his coffee. She could feel his eyes on her back as her vast intellect struggled with the equally vast guilt she felt. She'd been holding it off with the idea of its necessity. She couldn't afford to let Mage operate freely. They wouldn't afford to let Eric make a public statement as the head of the Protectorate.

She wondered, if she were alone, if Contessa would come. She wondered if Contessa could actually kill her. The thought had come more than once. "How?" she managed to ask. Her voice sounded odd—wet with emotion.

"Like I said, I've suspected for years," Warren said. He had a deep, mellifluous voice, like her father's, really. "The make-up you wear to make you look older is good, but age is more than just appearance. I don't move the way I used to. Not because I'm wiser, but because I've grown more decrepit with every year. You try, but it's the little things that give it away to those who know you. More importantly, Coven hasn't been shy in their implications. When you try to destroy a group of teenagers who are more popular than the president and more respected than named superheroes, it makes one wonder. Their account on PHO has had more hits and likes than yours and Eidolon's combined. There is a fan club out there of over fifty thousand young women calling themselves Mage's Girls. There are four planned movies floating around that very public kiss they shared before killing Leviathan. From what I understand, one of those movies continues to what happened after and has put your Media Relations department on high alert. You've lost, Rebecca."

He cleared his throat. "I suppose the real question is, are you going to kill me too?"

He asked it calmly. He was a veteran, he'd faced death before. Hell, he'd faced two E-88 assassination attempts as well. He was a respected black senator from New Hampshire, a hot-bed of the Empire's local brand of white nationalism.

"I'd prefer not to," Rebecca said, speaking softly as she recalled Eric's words.

"I'm glad to hear that," Warren said. Finally, he stood. Rebecca turned to face him, her emotions carefully trapped behind her inscrutable face. She could see what he meant to do in body language—it took effort for him to stand, and he had a certain turn in his hip from his last hip replacement. She knew he'd been wounded in action as a young man and those injuries lingered.

He stepped a few feet away, unheeding of the fact she could kill him with a single finger to his forehead. He reached up and took her shoulders, and to her utter shock pulled her into a gentle, grandfatherly hug. She didn't know what to do, either about the gesture or the agonizing emotions it brought up in her head. Her eye burned again as she awkwardly patted his back.

The senator stepped back. "It's only a matter of time before Mage and Skitter stop implying and just come out to announce who you are," he said. "My contacts in the PRT say the two haven't been very shy about how they're going to blackmail you at best, or destroy the PRT at worst. And by destroy, I don't mean with violence. You know they've by-passed the PRT and reached an agreement with the Brockton Bay City Council directly, right? The governor himself has reviewed their plans and said it's brilliant. If they went on television, you would be done. The PRT itself would be done. And if that movie script the DOJ got a hold of is filmed, there will be public unrest."

"I read the report last night," she said. She hated how her voice betrayed her.

He regarded her intently for a long moment, and in that gaze and the set of his shoulder she could see that he knew. He knew she was the one who wiped out the clinic where Skitter sought help. He knew she'd helped coordinate the death of one of her best friends. All in the name of a conspiracy that was falling apart around her. Their trump card, Contessa, just kept telling them it was part of the path. But not why.

"When I was eighteen years old, serving as a gunner onboard a Huey assault ship, we flew to a small village in 'Nam called My Lai," the senator said. "Our boys had slaughtered everyone there. I saw American soldiers shooting women and children point blank. One sick fuck was shooting grenades into groups of women who were trying to shield their children with their bodies. They'd gone insane. I'd never been so ashamed of the uniform as I was then. They offered me a medal when I testified. I threw it away. But see, I understand why they did it. The war made us all insane. It was pointless, and didn't seem like it would ever end. Our friends died around us and we couldn't ever find the enemy. Until at some point we became worse than the people we were fighting. I saw it happen a lot over there. And I've seen it happen here."

She found it ironic that this man was lecturing her on morality. If only he knew…

 _It wouldn't matter, because he's right._ She found it odd that her conscience sounded more like Hero than Legend.

"If word gets out, the Protectorate and the PRT both will shatter," she said. "Endbringer responses will cease to be effective. Villains will operate with impunity. Careers will end, lives will be lost."

It was an admission, but an admission of something they both knew.

"That's why I'm here, now, and not at a press conference on the Hill," Warren said. "For all the evil you might have done, you've also done a lot of good. You've suffered too. More importantly, Alexandria is too important to lose. I think…I think Rebecca that you need to retire. Perhaps for medical reasons."

Her mind raced. It would mean the loss of Cauldron's direct control over the PRT, but then again that was increasingly likely with Coven's meteoric rise in exposure and popularity. He was right—all it would take was one television interview and the PRT would be done.

"Armstrong would be the best replacement," she said at last. She felt some modicum of pride that her voice didn't crack. "West is in line because ofsSeniority, but his capes hate him. Armstrong has respect among both capes and PRT staff."

"Not Piggot or Tagg?"

"Piggot is a racist. She despises parahumans because of her experiences during the failed Nilbog raid. And Tagg…Tagg would have fit right in at My Lai."

Warren nodded. "West has powerful friends, but he's made powerful enemies as well. I'll make sure Armstrong is it. It'll help if you make an endorsement," he said.

She knew he could do it—Stillwater ran the committee that would confirm the appointment of her replacement. Short of his party's majority leader he was one of the most powerful men in the government.

There was so much she wanted to say, to do. "The war we fight is bigger than you can imagine," she finally said. Some small part of her—the part that lingered from the girl she once was—wanted him to understand. "Bigger than the Endbringers. We're fighting to save the world from something I'm not sure we can beat. Against an enemy like that, it feels like any sacrifice is justifiable."

Warren simply nodded. His face was carefully schooled, but she thought she saw sympathy in his eyes. "That doesn't make it any easier, does it?"

"No, it doesn't." She took a long, shuddering breath. She wished more than anything that she could shut off her thinker's power, but it was already racing ahead. It didn't surprise her when a portal opened behind the senator and Contessa stepped out.

Her face was blank, a sign she was lost in her power, but she made no move to kill either of them. Instead, she spoke, sounding so very young still. "Director, Senator, your helicopter is waiting."

Warren spun around, surprised. The portal was already gone, leaving just the exotic beauty in her suit and had in the office. "Who are you?"

"A special assistant," Rebecca said. Her mind raced. "I'm assuming you've scheduled a meeting in Brockton Bay?"

"The city's General Counsel has forwarded a request to meet with the PRT regarding the villain gang Coven. Director Piggot planned to handle it, but the Mayor's office forwarded the request here for a broader perspective."

Rebecca took a deep breath. "Thank you. Please inform Director Armstrong in Boston to be prepared to join us. We'll pick him up en route."

Contessa nodded before leaving the room through an actual door. Rebecca looked intently at the senator. He met her gaze evenly, knowing full well she could snap him like a twig. He showed respect, even sorrow, but no fear.

"Thank you, Warren," she said simply.

"Your welcome, Becca. I'm assuming I'm going to be coming?"

"It might help. Can you?"

He pulled out his phone. "I'll clear my schedule. I didn't really want to talk to the Daughters of the Republic anyway. The ladies are nice enough, but their meetings make Budget hearings on the hill seem like action films."

~~Simurgh's Son~~

~~Simurgh's Son~~

Meter square plates of rusted, barnacle-encrusted steel piled up on the far side of the plaza. Nearby, dock workers with bandanas across their faces and heavy gloves stood ready as Schism narrowed her eyes in concentration. Her power split the hull of the cargo hauler where she wanted, and in mere seconds another plate of metal fell loose.

She started on the hauler first thing that morning, viewing it more as exercise for her power than anything else. She had a mild ache in the back of her head, but Harry made sure she had a few dittany leaves on hand to relieve it if it got too bad. So far, in half an hour, she'd managed to carve out almost a quarter of the ship's hull. Sherril's recycler could 'eat' anything up to the size of a small pick-up truck, but anything larger than that required Schism to split up.

It was exciting. It was thrilling and wonderful and scary for Stephanie Schneider to use her power so openly and not worry about being shouted at or imprisoned.

The looks she got from the men working around her to gather the plates wasn't fearful or angry at all. They were thankful. They had something to do—real work. Though they weren't getting paid at all, Lisa was keeping track of work hours against the very real possibility of compensation from the city in the future.

Somewhere behind the hulk, Sherrill's monster-truck recycler continued to eat up debris. The thing looked like a giant caterpillar on wheels, with a huge open maw, scoops and giant mechanical pincers that literally pulled debris up off the ground and into its mouth. At first glance, she expected fire within the mouth. Only, it wasn't an incinerator—the furnace was toward the back, after all the material was sorted through the various Tinker-made mechanisms. Where the beast crawled, only a thin layer of trash remained and volunteers came after to clean that up.

Qiana was still working on the docks with Little Man and Genesis, who crafted an underwater body to confirm the basalt structures Qiana created were firmly set in the ground. The parts she'd already finished in the pier looked professionally made, with a deep-water channel running right up to the edge of her basalt piles. Basalt, it turned out, was a lot easier for Qiana to make than obsidian.

That morning, Tattletale unfolded a detailed topographical map she'd printed from the internet, using their newly re-established connectivity, which showed the docks region. Mage had flown high enough to mark out the areas of absolute destruction as opposed to the areas of heavy damage to the areas of moderate to minor damage, all the way east to the edge of the city with no damage at all.

Schism liked to think that Coven did all of the planning, but it turned out that among their refugees were several city engineers and an out-of-work architect whose firm handled city construction before the market fell out in the area.

The plan was to turn the old Docks and Boardwalk into a mixed commercial and residential area, while restoring the boat graveyard into a new, fully functional dock capable of handling shipping from all over the coast. Trans-Atlantic shipping was rare, but with the death of Leviathan popular news sites were already talking about the possibility of it picking up again.

The problem would be getting the city to commercialize the almost defunded Port Authority, and getting the funds to buy the obliterated parts of the Docks and Docks South. Yet, even with those worries, Stephanie felt…hopeful.

Harry even had a school planned out.

"Hey, Steph, look!"

The voice belonged to Tim Whitehead, one of the younger DWA workers. She followed his pointing finger to the beautiful black Escalade that just pulled onto Qiana's basalt pavers that formed their plaza. She knew the plans called for planter boxes and a fountain, but those would come later. Panacea's clinic had top priority.

The mayor himself climbed out.

"Mr. Hebert didn't say we were expecting the mayor," Tim said. "Should you…I don't know, go talk to him or something?"

Tim was cute, in a huge, clumsy Football-player sort of way. Though dwarfed by Tiny Man, he was still over 6 feet and two hundred pounds. He also had a pattern of zits across his forehead that he tried to cover with his tousled blonde hair.

"Harry, Taylor and Lisa take care of that part," she said. "I guess they're the leaders of Coven. If it's a big deal, we'll vote on it. But I trust them. They saved me."

Tim nodded like a big puppy dog, smiled awkwardly at her, then got ready for the next plate of hull metal.

~~Simurgh's Son~~

~~Simurgh's Son~~

Harry rode with the mayor in the man's official Escalade. He wore his new and improved costume, made from Darwin Bark Spider silk and transfigured into an approximation of his original costume. He carried his new staff, a hybrid of elder wood lined with silver runes but with a core of blood-infused mandrake root.

Not only could it channel his magic, it could hold it as well, like an actual wand. He didn't need it to cast magic, but using it make things easier, and his spells significantly more powerful. He didn't want to try powering a new heartstone without it, that much was certain.

The mayor studied him intently. "Phil shared Coven's master plan with me," he finally said.

Harry nodded, having voted to have Danny do just that. "What did you think?"

"I think…that you have some very smart, capable people who are trying to do the right thing."

"But…"

"None of the has any clue about city ordinance or zoning," Roy Christner said. "You've not got so far as to make it insurmountable, though, if Coven was willing to work with the BBPDA, that might go a long way."

"I…what is that?"

Christner laughed at the boy's befuddlement. "The Brockton Bay Planning and Development Agency."

"Oh, that's the group our architect called a bunch of pansies," Harry exclaimed. "I wondered. I think he worked there for a while."

"You must be thinking of Charles Whitmore. Yes, he was a whistle blower who was fired for exposing some gang kickbacks under my predecessor. The BBPDA has been cleaned out since then, all we lacked was money. But, you see, I have reason to believe the money situation may be changing soon. And your plan has a great deal of potential if its vetted by professionals who actually know what they're doing."

Harry shrugged. "That's fine. We wanted to work with the city, Mayor. That doesn't mean us trying to tell you what to do. At least to me, it means accountability on both sides."

"Good to hear, Mage. Good to hear."

They reached the temporary city hall, located half a mile east of Arcadia High. The high school marked the edge of Leviathan's storm surge, and had managed to come through relatively unscathed because of the hill it was built on. The temporary city hall was actually a converted Middle School.

The mayor led Harry up the steps, past several policy officers, to a set of metal detectors.

"Yeah, my magic sets those off," Harry noticed. "And, really, is there any point?"

The mayor shrugged. "Not really, I suppose. Let him pass on my authority, gentlemen."

They walked through the security check point without further searches and turned immediately into what was likely the school's administrative office. Four harried, exhausted women and two men were on the phones, typing or working on hastily set up laptops. A little seating area to the side was filled to standing room only with people seeking one service or another.

A pair of BBPD officers escorted them into the maze of offices until they reached a small conference room. Inside, dressed in slimming gray slacks and a cream blouse, stood Rebecca Costa-Brown, Chief Director of the PRT and the woman directly responsible for Legend's death.

"Mayor, thank you for your help," Costa-Brown said with a wry smile. "If you would give us a minute before joining us with the others?"

Mayor Christner nodded before leaving Mage alone in the room with one of the most powerful capes in the world.

She motioned for a chair across the conference table from where she sat, before sitting herself.

Harry placed his staff across the table and glared, trying very, very hard not to cast a bubblehead charm that would suffocate her to death.

From her hard, blank expression he suspected she knew exactly what he was thinking about, too.

"You don't know how close you've come to threatening the existence of the entire human race," she finally said.

Harry opened his mouth to make his typical smart-ass comment when that huge well of knowledge and wisdom that resided just under his conscious mind kicked him in the nads. He shut his mouth and actually thought about it for a moment before understanding dawned.

"You fucking bitch," he whispered. "You hypocritical utter fucking bitch. You already knew. You and your little cabal already knew. The Endbringers weren't the real threat. They were just the second wave, after the powers themselves. And what have you done about it?"

Alexandria, even in her civilian guise, was considered one of the most powerful Thinkers in the world. Even so, she appeared startled, though only for a split second.

"More than you could possibly imagine," she said coldly. "And you've jeopardized that."

"With all due…fuck that. No respect. If I alone was enough to jeopardize your plans, then they sucked to begin with."

"Arrogance," she muttered.

"You should talk, Alexandria."

"Be careful how you talk to me, boy," she said with narrowed eyes.

"Or what? I can think of about fifteen ways to kill you right now. You still have to breathe. I can have you in orbit in a second. I could shoot you into the sun in about two minutes. The fact that I haven't slaughtered the whole fucking Protectorate isn't because I can't, it's because _I didn't want to._ But you, for what you did to Legend and Taylor…"

He left it hanging, but she understood well. "I did what I did for the greater good of all mankind."

"Yeah, I'm sure Hitler said the same thing."

She had far too much control to surge to her feet, but he could see her radiating rage.

"Why am I here?" he demanded, finally.

"Because you possess knowledge which could jeopardize the world," she said. "And you're too fucking stupid to keep it to yourself."

"You murdered the only decent man in the Protectorate, and came damned close to killing my girlfriend. I don't give a fuck what you think. Murderers don't get to preach from a pulpit."

She visibly forced herself back in her chair. "Mutually assured destruction. If you reveal my identity, there would be nothing to keep me from killing all of your friends."

"Except me, and a portkey to high orbit or a warp matrix to the sun," Harry challenged. "Do better than that, Alexandria. You have no idea just how powerful I can be. And you have no idea how angry I am at you right now. I thought Coil was it for me. But this? You, here, now? Fuck Coil. You have no power over me. You have no leverage. And I would gladly see the Protectorate burn to the ground if it means taking you with it."

Harry wished he had Tattletale's power. Even with his occlumency in full force, she simply had no tells to speak of.

"I'm prepared to offer concessions," she said, though she might have more easily volunteered to have a donkey forcibly inserted in her ass for all the warmth she had in the admission.

"Concessions for what, my silence?"

"You seem to be aware that there are much larger issues at play," she said. "I cannot…allow my personal interest to interfere in those issues. That's what this meeting is about. I ask you to keep your knowledge to yourself until the meeting is concluded, and then make your decision based on the additional facts and circumstances you'll be given."

"And who is at this meeting?"

"Senator Warren Stillwater, Chairman of the Joint Committee on Parahuman Affairs, Mayor Christner, and PRT Boston Director Archibald Armstrong."

"Skitter and Tattletale will attend remotely," he said.

"We can arrange…"

Harry touched the lapel of his robe and the rose there. "Lisa, Taylor, can you hear me?"

"Loud and clear," Taylor's voice said. She sounded as if she were seated next to him.

"Hear her out, Harry," Lisa added. "The art of compromise is making sure everyone is equally unhappy, and right now Alexandria is pissed."

Harry nodded before smirking at Alexandria's cold death-glare of rage. "Yeah, I can see that. Alright, Chief-Director, Coven will hear you out."


	56. Acquisition 6

A/N: Chap 55 review responses are in my forums. If it hasn't become abundantly clear, we're in the declining action of the story. There are roughly ten chapters left.

* * *

 **Acquisition 7.6**

Archibald "Archie" Armstrong appeared to be a man in his late forties. He had the build of an athlete long lost to a desk job—a belly hanging off a once powerful frame. He was clean shaven save for a mustache that had more white than black, and short-cropped black hair that had grayed wildly at the temples.

He wore a modestly tailored three-piece suit in charcoal gray over a light blue shirt. He didn't offer a hand to Harry, but neither did he ignore him. Instead, he merely nodded. "Mage. I'm Director Armstrong from the Boston office."

"Director. And I remember Senator Stillwater from New York." Harry noted the senator offered a hand, which he took. The senator's suit was of a markedly higher cut and quality than Armstrong's.

"I'm sorry for your loss," the senator said with a somber expression. "I know you and Legend shared a complex relationship, but I also could see that you cared for each other."

" _The senator knows. He's in on it, but he's on our side. Mostly."_ Lisa's voice came through a _protean-_ charmed skin-patch inside his ear.

The mayor was the last to join them and shut the door behind them. They all sat down at the cardinal points of the table, maintaining a safe distance from each other.

"I'd like to begin by making a statement," Alexandria said, still firmly in her civilian guise. "I intend to announce my retirement from the PRT effective immediately. I've become very good at make-up, but I've reached a point where it's becoming harder for me to hide the effects of the chemotherapy. I have Stage IV ovarian cancer. It has already metastasized and short of intervention from Panacea, I will not survive the year. I've chosen not to ask for that intervention for personal reasons."

" _Holy fuck that woman is a good liar._ " Lisa sounded almost awe-struck.

Without his own occlumency and the fact he knew what was happening, Harry would have bought it hook, line and sinker. She carried off the quiet dignity of a strong person rendered terminally ill with utter perfection.

Armstrong and the Mayor both looked shocked and sorrowful. The Senator looked pensive, and glanced briefly at Harry. Even without Tattletale, Harry understood. _Go along with it._

"What's this got to do with me?" Harry said, not bothering to hide his antagonism.

"Young man, have some respect!" Armstrong began.

"For what? She ordered me and my girlfriend arrested during an Endbringer truce, right after killing the damned Endbringer!"

"He's right, Archie," Costa-Brown said. She sighed tragically. "Which is why I've asked you all here. Archie, I'm sure you know about Prism?" The other director nodded. "What you may not know is that her assassin gave us enough clues that we were able to capture both him, and his boss. We caught Coil yesterday afternoon. In return for taking the death penalty off the table, he cooperated with us. We have a comprehensive, video confession from Coil that shed new light on the situation with Coven."

" _It always comes down to Coil,"_ Tattletale said, so bitterly Harry had to bite back a wince.

"What do you mean?" Armstrong asked.

"Nearly every major crime Mage, Skitter and Tattletale have been accused off was false. From the murder of Marissa Hawkins and Noel Meinhardt onward. Most recently, Coil managed to abduct Canary, and arranged through his moles in the PRT to have Skitter remanded to his custody. Canary was tortured until she used her power to compel Skitter to attempt to assassinate Legend. And Prism…Coil knew her civilian identity and held her sister hostage to force her to help. Those Skitter killed in escaping she did so in clear self-defense against an impossible problem.

"Coil had the people in the clinic Skitter sought treatment in killed in the hopes it would drive Alexandria to lose her temper. To a certain extent, it worked. Alexandria also admitted to me that she hurt Skitter far beyond what was necessary to capture her, and additionally sent her to the Birdcage without adequate treatment for her injuries. Mage, Skitter and Tattletale are innocent and all have suffered at the hands of both the Protectorate and the PRT, with a villain pulling us along by our noses."

"That doesn't change the fact that they recruited known Birdcage prisoners," Director Armstrong pointed out.

"I spoke to the President on the way up here," Senator Stillwater said. "In the cases of Canary, Smolder and Schism, there were extenuating circumstances that in any other instance would have had Smolder and Canary as probationary Wards instead of in the Birdcage, and Schism with a much more reasonable jail term than a life in hell."

"Dragon admitted that she has had to imprison several people who in her opinion did not deserve it," Costa-Brown said. "Her Amicus Brief for Canary, for instance, is public record."

"Which is why the President is prepared to offer a pardon for them," Stillwater said.

Harry went very still. "What do you want?"

"I want to leave office without the Coven situation hanging over the PRT or the Protectorate," Costa-Brown answered, meeting his eyes squarely. "I intend to announce my resignation tonight. I've asked Director Armstrong here because I very much want him to be my successor, and Senator Stillwater agrees. And the Mayor is here because he's the one who wanted to convince the PRT and Protectorate to stop pursuing you so that his city could work with you directly."

" _Harry, we have her,_ " Lisa whispered. _"She knows what will happen if we divulge what we know. Push, but not too hard. She's on the edge, feeling as if she's sacrificing herself for a greater goal. If we push too hard, and she thinks that goal is in jeopardy, she'll attack."_

"That's not enough," Harry said. "Not for what you've done to us. Not for what happened to Legend. To all of us."

"I know." The admission seemed to cause her physical pain. "My last act as chief director will be to remove all members of Coven from the villain registry. I will rescind the kill orders and annotate your records to clarify that you were innocent of all charges. Additionally, with the Parahuman Committee's knowledge I've been authorized to offer a sum of twenty million dollars to Coven, tax exempt, for the pain and suffering experienced by the various members of your group at the PRTs…at my hands."

"Not going to try and make us Wards?"

"Mage, I'm sure we could both agree that would be a terrible idea."

She was offering freedom, and throwing money at them, in the hopes they would keep their mouths shut. Worse yet, it would probably work. Except…

"Skitter, Tattletale, what do you think?"

Armstrong and the Senator both looked surprised when the two girl's voices emerged from the rose at his lapel. " _It's a band-aid over a bullet wound_ ," Taylor said.

" _But it's more than they've ever offered before_ ," Lisa added. " _However, it doesn't address the whole issue of children in the Birdcage, or lack of oversight or appeal for the sentencing process. During our first trial, we were sentenced in a closed court without possibility of appeal to a prison that had no means of exit. That has to stop. Smolder was barely seventeen when she was sent to hell for life, all because she defended herself against a cartel that had just murdered her brother and gang-raped her. Schism was just a teen when she was arrested, and three years later sentenced because, in a state of untreated, near suicidal depression over the loss of her parents, she heard kids making fun of her circumstances and accidently killed a senator's son. These are not Birdcage offenses. And if you even had a shadow of an idea how they were tortured in there…_ "

She left it hanging.

Armstrong looked deeply trouble. "I had no idea," he admitted.

"And that, too, is my fault," Costa-Brown said. "The PRT will recommend a cessation of all Birdcage transfers until we can ensure a better appeals and oversight system. I would recommend that no matter what, but I'm sure that is something Director Armstrong would agree to."

"Absolutely."

"And what about Alexandria?" Harry finally said. His voice trembled. "She broke Skitter's arm and leg, and then sent her into the Birdcage in poorly made casts knowing full well what she could expect. If Lustrum hadn't saved her, she would have been handed to the male prisoners as a…." He couldn't bring himself to say it. "What about her responsibility in all this?"

"Alexandria also stopped Skitter from shooting herself in the head," Costa-Brown said, meeting Harry's gaze with almost a smug satisfaction.

Harry reared back as if slapped. In his ear, Taylor whispered, " _I thought you were lost, Harry. And I'd just killed Legend. I didn't think I had anything to live for._ "

"Doesn't change anything." Harry's voice cracked. "She wouldn't have felt she had to try if she weren't in that situation to begin with."

"We need Alexandria," Armstrong said. "But that said, if that's all true, I'm not sure the other directors would want her to maintain her position within the Protectorate. With Legend deceased and Eidolon out of contact, the Protectorate is drifting, I fear."

 _Eidolon was out of contact?_ Harry hadn't heard that. It didn't matter, though. Alexandria was trying to create a situation the same as Coil used, throwing his civilian identity to the wolves to save his criminal one.

"I cannot speak for Alexandria," Costa-Brown lied. "But she was the one who recommended me for this post, and we do speak often. I know she's come to find the bureaucratic aspects of her position tedious. She formed the Triumvirate to fight the Endbringers, expecting me and the PRT to handle the bureaucracy. It came as a surprise to find how much paperwork came on the cape side as well. She's…remorseful enough that she can likely be convinced to retire from the Triumvirate so that she can concentrate on actually saving people."

" _Harry, we're not getting more than that._ " Even Lisa sounded subdued with the devastating revelation that the girl Harry loved almost killed herself.

"What do you want from Coven?" It hurt to speak.

Costa-Brown's gaze burned like a tinker's lasers. "Signed non-disclosure forms agreeing not to divulge any of this to the public in any capacity. Signed Affiliate agreements with the local PRT. I understand that besides you and Skitter, there are three other minors living with you. Aisha Laborn, Dinah Alcott and Jess Haskins. Because they are capes they don't fall under CPS jurisdiction, but the Youth Guard would want to review their circumstances."

"For the record, I am Dinah Alcott's legal guardian," the Mayor said. He sounded a little numbed from the sheer intensity of the discussion. "I've spoken with her and feel that her current location is in her best interest. I also confirmed that Aisha Laborn's mother is unfit to care for her, and her father was killed in Leviathan's attack. Her brother was a cape who was killed during Bakuda's terrorist campaign of the city. Haskins will be eighteen in three months."

"Skitter's father lives on site with us," Harry said. "And given my own upbringing I hope you'll forgive me for not giving a fuck about what the Youth Guard wants for me."

"We can handle that on the city's end," the Mayor said quickly. "I suppose then I would also ask the PRT to issue a business exemption for Coven. They've produced a revitalization plan for the city that I think could benefit everyone. And they would be business stakeholders in it."

"If the request is on my desk before my announcement tonight, I'll approve it."

Harry nodded. "Coven agrees. Get your disclosures to us and we'll sign them. You can give our money to the city until we've established accounts to receive it. If you'll excuse me?" Before they had a chance to say anything, Harry gripped his staff, stood and disapparated back to Lisa's office.

Taylor was already standing, her arms crossed over her blouse as she stared at him. He offered her his hand, and without a word she took it. A spin later, and they were a mile over the city, him holding her on his lap as they floated on his staff.

"I'm sorry I never…"

Harry kissed her. So hard it almost hurt. Then he squeezed her tight.

"I get it," he said over her head. "I have memories of killing myself. Of all my lives, I think I killed myself at least twenty times. The first time…the first time I took a castle filled with women and children with me. I get it. And I'm…" His voice caught and he squeezed her tight. "I'm sorry you went through that."

She leaned back enough to reach for and hold his cheeks in her hands.

"But you came for me." Her eyes were red, and a single tear traced down her cheeks. "I was in hell, and you came for me, Harry. I'd go through everything again, no matter how bad, as long as I know you'll be there for me."

"Always and forever," he said as he kissed her.

~~Simurgh's Son~~

~~Simurgh's Son~~

They watched the news conference on the big screen in the common room. Taylor sat on Harry's lap, an arm draped around his shoulder, while next to them Lisa hugged one arm over her ribs while with her free hand she held a wine glass tightly. On the side sofa, Paige leaned into Qiana while the two held the twins. Stephanie sat on the other end of the sofa gently bouncing Peter.

Dinah and Aisha laid side-by-side in the middle of the floor. Dinah had a coloring book spread out between them.

On the opposite couch sat George, Sherril and Panacea, while Jess parked her wheelchair beside Tiny Man's side of the couch. Phil Lendy, Danny Hebert and Bill Perkins from Magnate Shipping all stood behind the couch.

"… _responsibility for the failure of the PRT and the Protectorate to ensure all of our citizens, Parahuman and mundane alike, have fair treatment under the law. It is for this reason that I made a recommendation to the President for clemency for the Parahumans known as Mage, Skitter, Tattletale, Canary, Smolder and Schism. Upon review of all the facts and circumstances, the President has agreed and issued a full pardon for all them. Upon my authority I have removed these young people from the Villain Registry. After a productive meeting in Brockton Bay, the independent group known as Coven has signed a PRT affiliate agreement._

" _While they have had some small measure of justice to set right at least some of the wrongs they have experienced, I as Chief Director cannot ignore my own responsibility in how the system I helped build failed these children so badly. In my obsession over my own mortality, I lost sight of my responsibility to those I was charged to protect. The PRT's mission is not just to protect people from parahumans, but to protect the Parahumans themselves. In this last, I, personally, failed. That is why I am resigning effective immediately as Chief Director."_

The room erupted in questions and loud chatter, but it died down immediately as the tall, imposing figure of Alexandria stepped onto the stage the Chief Director used.

"That's a good body double," Lisa muttered before taking a long pull of wine. Harry and Taylor shared a concerned look at their friend before the Alexandria look-like spoke.

" _Good evening. You know who I am. What you may not know was that I was there when Rebecca was sworn in as Chief Director. In fact, part of my agreement to form the Protectorate was dependent on her taking over the civilian duties. Rebecca in many ways is my better half, as long as I've known her. Finding out about her cancer was almost as devastating as the day we lost Hero. As the day we lost Legend._

" _While she is quick to take the blame for the villain Coil's actions, I too must take responsivity for my actions against Skitter. In my rage and pain at the loss of my brother, I hurt her far beyond what was needed. I often tell my Wards that members of the Protectorate must be better. We have to be better than all those around us because our burden is that much heavier. On the day I captured Skitter, I failed that standard. I, too, take responsibility for that failure. I intend to resign my post in the Triumvirate, effective immediately. I've recommended Chevalier to take over in my absence, though of course this will require ratification from Acting Director Armstrong and the President. I swear this, though. I will never stop in my fight to protect our people from the Endbringers. Right now, however, I want very much to take care of my friend, and ensure that her last weeks on this earth are spent with those she loves. Thank you."_

"Did she just…did she just imply that she and Director Costa Brown are…lovers? They're the same person, right?" Harry looked about the room seeking clarification.

"Oh, course she did," Lisa said as she drained her wine. "Now she's the star-crossed lover mourning her dying partner instead of the woman who murdered a bunch of innocent people. Just perfect. We got everything we wanted, and somehow we still fucking lost!"

She stood quickly from the couch and swayed a moment before she stumbled away to her room.

~~Simurgh's Son~~

~~Simurgh's Son~~

Harry tapped on the door before opening it. It was well past midnight, and he found Lisa sitting at her desk staring at a darkened computer monitor. A plastic milk jug that she repurposed for wine sat half empty on the desk. She'd dressed in pajamas, but wasn't asleep.

"What do you want, Harry?" she said tiredly without turning to face him.

"You okay? I heard someone scream."

"Harry, you're a doll, but fuck off, okay? I'm fine."

The door opened wider and Taylor stood by his side. "Bullshit. You're not fine at all."

"Says the girl who tried to eat a bullet." Lisa snorted, then bent over and covered her face. "Fuck. I didn't say that."

Taylor stiffened as if slapped, before shaking her head. "You did. And you meant it. This can't go on, Lisa. You're making yourself sick."

"So what? We all have problems."

Taylor stepped further into the room and placed a hand on her shoulder, only for Lisa to jerk away and slap the hand. "Don't touch me! I _hate_ being touched. Don't ever touch me!"

"Come with us, Lisa."

"Fuck you, Harry. Go away."

"Come with us now, Lisa," Harry said. "Come on your own, or we'll carry you."

Lisa spun chair around, eyes blazing from behind dark rings of exhaustion. "You wouldn't think twice to jump my bones, would you? Hell, it was all you could do to keep from fucking Squealer. All you need is a pair of tits and…"

Taylor punched her. It wasn't slap, it was a closed-fist blow that sent Lisa sprawling from her chair. The blonde scrambled back to her feet, raging, only to stop when she saw tears in Taylor's eyes.

"You're the first friend I had after Emma," Taylor hissed. "Don't you dare betray me like she did. Don't…you…fucking…dare!"

Lisa collapsed back to the ground, covering her face again and rocking. Harry knelt down beside her, feeling sick with the need to somehow make it right.

Taylor knelt down in front of her and grabbed her hands. "Lisa, look at me."

"FUCK YOU!" It was a screeching cry; desperate. Desolate.

"Look at me." Taylor actually spoke softer. "Please. Look at me.'

Lisa looked up, eyes red with tears.

"I swear to you, we won't hurt you," Taylor said. "No matter what you say, no matter what you do, we won't hurt you."

"You just fucking punched me!"

"That was medicinal, it didn't count," Taylor said dismissively. "That was for your own good. We won't hurt you. We won't touch you like…like Coil or his people did. Does your power believe me?"

"Fuck my power."

"Do you believe me, Lisa?"

"Yes, goddamn it. Now go away."

"No, not without you."

Lisa's eyes bulged a moment before Harry scooped her up bridal-style in his arms. "Put me down!" Lisa screamed, kicked and punched. "Put me down, fuck it all! Please, please put me down!"

Harry looked at Taylor for guidance, but his girlfriend stood resolute. "We can't put you down, Lisa. We won't. But we're not going to hurt you, I promise. Listen to me with your power. We love you, Lisa, and we _will not hurt you._ "

Lisa went limp in Harry's arms, sobbing uncontrollably. Harry held the door open.

In the hallway, Paige stood with her arms across her chest and tears in her eyes. The others stood behind her, all concerned. Lisa avoided their eyes by burying her face in the cloth of Harry's sleeping shirt.

"Put me down," she whispered. "Please, Harry."

"I can't," Harry said, his own voice trembling. "You're hurt, and I can't keep ignoring it. I'm sorry."

Taylor led them back to the room she and Harry had made their home. They closed the door behind them and Harry carried her to their king-sized bed. Taylor climbed onto the far side, and Harry laid down on the edge with Lisa in the middle, and then pulled the thin sheet up over them while Lisa trembled and wept between them.

Neither of them touched her. They kept a few inches between their bodies.

"You're going to sleep here tonight," Taylor explained. "And you _are_ going to sleep. And we'll be here to protect you. I swear to you, Lisa, no one will hurt you. I swear."

"I hate you both," Lisa choked.

"Too bad. We love you. And that's why we're not going to touch you, or do anything to you," Harry said. "We're just going to be here and protect you, so you can sleep. We promise."

Lisa said nothing, she just squeezed her eyes shut and put the heels of her hands over them. They remained that way in the silence of the night until all three finally fell asleep.

~~Simurgh's Son~~

~~Simurgh's Son~~

Harry woke up with an arm over his chest and drool soaking into his ear. He blinked back sleep and turned in the morning light streaming from Taylor's bay window to see Lisa cuddling him as if he were a teddy bear. And curled up behind her was his girlfriend.

"Oh god, if only," he muttered.

Lisa stiffened abruptly, as if she heard him. Her stiffening woke Taylor with a start.

"What…Lisa, are you okay?"

"What are you doing to me?" Lisa hissed.

"Well, at the moment I'm trying very hard not to let you see my raging stiffy, because I just woke up in bed with two hot women," Harry said. "Other than that, I was thinking about wiping your drool from my ear."

Taylor snorted. "Harry…"

"I was gonna try and hide it. You know the damned thing has a mind of its own!"

Taylor propped herself up until she sat cross-legged on the bed. Lisa immediately scrambled against the wall between pillows. Harry followed her eyes to Taylor's sleeping shirt, which hung low enough to show a very nice…

"Nope, down boy, down boy!" he muttered.

"What the fuck was point of all that?" Lisa demanded.

Harry shrugged. "You slept."

"So what? You didn't have the right to…"

Taylor grabbed her hand, hard. Lisa might have been older, but Taylor was a very strong young woman. "Lisa, you _slept._ You haven't slept since Harry rescued you, and we all know it. You slept. That's why we did this. And that's why tonight we're going to do it again."

Lisa shook her head. "You guys don't understand. What he did…what he was going to do. What he probably already did do in the time line, you just don't…"

"Lisa, we're not looking to be your lovers," Taylor said simply. "I really don't care for women. And Harry is mine. But…you were my first friend as a parahuman. And you're hurting, and this helped you sleep. So, this is how it's going to be from now on. Harry swears not to touch you, and I have no real interest in touching you. If we want intimate time, we'll find it. But when it's time to sleep, we want you here with us."

"I need to leave," Lisa declared.

They made no move to stop her as she ran out of the room.

~~Simurgh's Son~~

~~Simurgh's Son~~

That night, Lisa stepped into their room clutching one of her teddy bears. She wore conservative silk pajamas and looked ready to bolt. Taylor and Harry were both sitting up in their bed, reading. Lisa took a look at them and snorted.

"Gods, you guys are like my fucking grandparents."

"Oh, be glad you didn't show up half an hour ago," Harry said with a lecherous grin.

"Why do you think I didn't?" Lisa walked to the bed and sat down, looking at each one of them intently. She took a deep, shuddering breath. "Coil…threatened me with…his men. Stalker threatened me with the Panthers. He knew how much that scared me. He knew I was attacked right after I ran away from home. I think…I think he might have used his alternate timelines to do just that, to make sure the threat would work. And it did. Oh God, it did…" She paused and wiped an eye.

Harry put down his book. "I widened the bed by a foot. Now instead of king-sized it's a Dictator-of the-world sized bed. All of us should be able to sleep without touching if you want."

Lisa just shook her head. "I wish I knew what I did to deserve you guys."

"You sent me porn when I needed it most," Harry said with an innocent look. Taylor thumped his head with her index finger. "Oh, yeah, you set Taylor and me up. That was pretty awesome, too. Oh, and you flashed us. Man, that was just…"

"Shut up, Harry," Taylor said.

"Too much?"

"Way, way too much."

Lisa shook her head, smiled, and then slowly crawled between them. "I'm not weak," she declared.

"Yes, you are," Harry said without batting an eye. "So are we. Without Taylor, I'd still be in the Birdcage. She was the reason we escaped. It's like everything else. I have all this power but no idea how to use it or what to do with it. I _need_ you both."

"And without Harry, I'd probably be dead," Taylor said. "And without you, we wouldn't have each other."

Harry turned out the lights and the three settled down for sleep.

"For the record, if you two started screwing in the night I'm so outta here."

"Noted," Taylor said with a laugh. "Good night, Lisa. Sleep tight."

"I…I'll try."

"Do, or do not. There is not try."

"Shut up Harry."

"God you're a doofus, Harry."

All three laughed until they finally, peacefully, fell asleep.


	57. Interlude: Incorporation

A/N: Chap 56 review responses are in my forums as normal. _**I also have a poll I'd like your opinion on.**_

* * *

 **Interlude: Incorporation**

Amelia Lavere, formerly known as Amy Dallon, walked through a clinic that just this morning was nothing more than an empty stretch of land across the basalt-paved plaza from the lair…no, headquarters, of Coven.

The headquarters even had a sign across the front of the building now: COVEN ENTERPRISES, LLC.

The clinic itself was not particularly huge in terms of businesses—roughly eight thousand square feet. However, over three thousand of that square footage was dedicated to Amelia's personal living area.

"This door exists for only two people," Harry explained as he opened the door into her living area. "You, and me. I'll make a special key that you can give to people if you want them to have access."

"Why do you have access?" Amelia asked.

Harry merely shrugged. "Because your home is magically secured, and I'm the only one on earth with real magic."

The clinic itself had a wide, airy waiting area facing south with windows that let in sunlight at all times of the day. The room was divided by a sleek built-in receptionist desk and a small administrative area that carved a square shape out of the wall that separated the patient rooms from the lobby. Even so, the administrative area was also secure, with glass walls to ensure no one could get to the back. A single door in the separating wall led from the lobby to the patient rooms.

There were a total of five small, simple patient rooms. All the rooms were empty, but clean and well lit.

It was her personal quarters beyond, however, that took her breath away.

"Wow," she breathed as Harry led her into her new home.

Like the clinic, the space was empty, but the potential left her breathless. The ground floor was wide and open, with a large sunken living area that just screamed for sofas, bookshelves and an entertainment center against the wall that separated the living area from the clinic. She even saw all the necessary hooks-ups.

Beyond was a wide, open area with a spectacular floor-to-ceiling window looking over the ocean. To her left she saw a large kitchen that, while lacking appliances, looked modern and efficient. A breakfast nook provided additional views. Harry led her past the nook into a utility room.

Amelia opened what she thought was a pantry room and found herself facing an empty, small room with the walls lined in archaic runes. "What's this?"

"An emergency exit," Harry said. "It's a switching cabinet, matched with one in Coven's personal apartments. You step in, close the door, and when you open it again you're in our headquarters. That's in case something does manage to break your wards. Or, more likely, if someone tries to surround and trap you in your clinic. You can always escape here and we'll protect you. I don't think you'll need it, but frankly you're too damned important to take any risks. Only you and me can use it come here."

They went up the wide, spiral staircase to the second floor. Amy's bedroom was almost as large as the Dallon's living room, with its own exquisite bathroom. More importantly, it had three other guest rooms, three full-sized bathrooms, an up-stairs laundry room, and every convenience she could ask for.

Her eyes burned a little as she stopped and stared out the window. "Thank you," she finally said.

She was expecting one of his typical smarmy, sexist comments. Instead, he said, "Your welcome. I'm glad you're close, Amy."

"Amelia," she said.

"Right. Amelia. So, um…the wards tell me Glory Girl is pounding on the door again. Do you want me to portkey her away like last time?"

"If…I let her in…?"

"The protection is intent-based. As long as she doesn't try to do anything you don't want her to do, nothing will happen. The moment she _intends_ to do something you don't want, the wards will teleport her away over the Bay."

Amelia thought about it a moment before nodding. "I'd like to talk to her alone."

Harry nodded. "Understood. Besides, I think there's a board meeting I'm supposed to be at. Figure that—I'm on a corporate board. Bye!" He popped away.

In the silence that followed, Amy walked back down stairs, stepped through the door from her home, through the door to the lobby, and continued until she stopped right before the glass door to the outside. The girl who waited outside did not wear her costume, but rather worn jeans and a simple, surprisingly dirty T-shirt. Her eyes looked red, her shoulders slumped and her hair looked tangled and filthy. Amy had never seen her look so…dejected.

She opened the door. "Before you come in, understand that if you try to take me out of here, Mage's magic will teleport you into the bay."

Vicky hugged herself. "I won't. I just really need to talk to you. Please?"

Amelia stepped back and motioned for her sister in all but blood to walk in. Vicki looked around the place in wonder. "This wasn't here yesterday."

"Mage created it this morning."

"This is…this is your clinic?"

"Yeah. I got a low-interest loan from the city for furniture and supplies, and to hire a couple of people to help."

Vicki nodded and made a point of looking everywhere but Amelia. That is, until the latter cleared her throat.

"What do you want, Vicki?"

"I want my sister back," Vicki whispered.

"Then you shouldn't have let mom…Carol put a fucking shock collar on me and treat me like an animal." Even Amelia was surprised at the heat in her voice.

More surprising was how Vicki winced and sobbed. "I'm sorry, Amy. God, I'm so sorry. I knew it was wrong, but…but…you were going away and I didn't know what to do and…and…"

A miasma of misery swept over Amy so powerfully she stepped back. "And you let your mother put a shock collar on me, and used that damned aura of yours to try and make me feel guilty for hating it."

"I…I didn't…!"

"Maybe not intentionally," Amelia said. "But that's what happened. Just like you're using your aura now to make me feel sorry for you. And before, when you used your aura to make me love you. Thing is, Vicki, I'm not really your sister. I remember my real dad, even if just barely. And when you made me love you, it wasn't as a sister."

Vicki's sobbing stalled and she looked confused. "But…but…I'm a girl."

"And Legend's spouse was a man. What's your point?"

Vicki's eyes bulged comically even as she hiccupped. "I'm sorry, I didn't mean to!"

"You never do, Vicki. You didn't mean to hurt all those criminals you broke, or to guilt me into fixing it for you so you wouldn't get arrested. You didn't mean to make me fall in love with you, and you didn't mean for Carol to put that collar on. But it happened. It happened and I just can't ever forget it."

"But…but…"

Amy was surprised that the question which had been making her sick for years now flowed so easily from her lips.

"Vicki, could you ever imagine making love to me?"

Vicki sputtered. "NO!"

Amelia winced. The answer didn't surprise her, only the disgust with which it was delivered.

"And that's why I can't go back to being a part of your life. I don't see you as a sister, I see you as a love interest. And we both know you could never return my feelings. It would just continue to hurt me, as long as I was around. No…I think the best thing to do would be for us to just go our separate ways. I've already provided my testimony to the PRT concerning how Carol treated me, and volunteered for power testing to qualify as an affiliated rogue. I've asked that Director Piggot not pursue any charges against New Wave, but she has agreed to provide an _Amicus_ brief to the court to support my restraining order petition."

"Amy…"

"I go by Amelia. Amelia Lavere. It's my given name, after all." Amelia smiled sadly. "For the home that New Wave did provide, if any of you need healing, I will provide it free of charge. But that's the extent of any relationship I want with any of you. Good bye, Vicki. Be careful with the criminals you catch, or you might end up in a lot of trouble."

She turned her back on the woman who had been her sister for almost fourteen years. She stepped into her personal quarters, and when she was alone leaned against the wall until her knees gave out. She slid down to the floor and sobbed until she couldn't breathe.

~~Simurgh's Son~~

~~Simurgh's Son~~

Board meetings were boring. That was one of the many things from the immortal experiences of Harry Potter that still applied in his latest and oddest incarnation.

It should have been exciting—it was the first meeting of the Brockton Bay Development Corporation. Coven was one of four corporate stakeholders, along with Magnate Shipping, the DWA and Seaboard Rail. They voted in officers who were mainly people from the DWA or Magnate whom Harry had never met, but whom Danny knew personally, laid out Lisa and Taylor's initial plan for the redevelopment of the boat graveyard and the trainyard neighborhoods, discussed projected expenses versus budgets and possible revenues, and other excruciatingly boring things.

It went on for a whole day, pausing only for a lunch of dry sandwiches and cans of soda that bordered on going bad.

For all his magic, Harry was in awe of how Danny handled things. Phil Lendy was named President of the new corporation, since Bill Perkins said he was too old, but Danny was the CEO, which Harry thought was cool. Coven was a silent partner in the running of the new corporation itself, but then again Harry wasn't really all that interested in the boat graveyard or the train yard.

Well, maybe. He'd been playing with his memories to maybe pull out some old high-speed monorail designs that he might be able to sell off.

Mainly, he and Coven were interested in the land around their headquarters, which because of the settlement from the PRT and a generous grant from the city, now belonged to them from the boardwalk to the Market, and inland half-way to Taylor's old house where the residential zoning began.

"Wake up, we're done," Taylor hissed.

Harry started, then wiped drool from the corner of his mouth. "I was…thinking."

Down the table, Bill Perkins snorted while Danny chuckled.

"That's okay, Harry. It was a good meeting. You were awake when you had to be. However, you might want to think about appointing a proxy for Coven for every-day business votes."

"I thought we had. Isn't that you?"

Danny shrugged. "It can be. Probably should be even with your emancipation pending. But I figured that was a Coven decision."

"Draw up the papers," Taylor said. "We'll put it up for a vote, but I'd say it's a pretty sure thing. Besides, I thought the BBDC was just a holding company."

"No, that's Coven Enterprises," Lisa said from the other side of Harry. "We formed the company to shield Coven from any losses BBDC experiences, while we own a majority share."

"How'd we do that again?" Harry asked.

Lisa shrugged. "We leveraged our powers against the money. That's why Schism and Smolder are going to be working on the BBDC issue first. And Harry, of course."

"That's confusing," Harry muttered.

Lisa shrugged. "That's what Taylor and I are for."

Harry grinned. "Thank God for that."

~~Simurgh's Son~~

~~Simurgh's Son~~

The attorney didn't even blink an eye when faced with the wrath of Kaiser.

Max Anders, now publicly known as the leader of the Empire 88, considered killing the man where he sat just for his brazenness, except he was sure the man's firm would bill him for it. The fact that the nameless, unremarkable man agreed to come to an abandoned King Burger on the southern outskirts of town and sat on a molded plastic bench while placing the corpse of Max Ander's empire before him, spoke of either a special type of courage, or the utter confidence of what would happen if he were harmed.

Law firms such as this mans' were not above employing mercenary capes to defend their people.

"So what does that mean to my assets?" Max felt was proud of how level he kept his voice.

The attorney cleared his throat, but not nervously. Rather, like a professor having to repeat himself to a particularly dense student. "It means that aside from any liquid assets you may have physically in your possession, you have none. The Parahuman Criminal Justice Act of '93 gives the PRT authority to seize any assets or real property found by a court to be owned by, and used for the support of, any villain parahumans named on the villain registry. The Superior Court of New Hampshire ruled in favor the PRT motion to have MedHall Pharmaceuticals listed as an asset owned by and used for the support of the Empire 88.

"Since every unmasked cape with Empire Eighty-Eight was listed under their civilian names as having executive positions with Medhall, each with significant salaries, there was little our firm could do to prevent it despite our most aggressive tactics. Medhall and all associated assets have been placed into receivership. All known accounts linked to the named members of E88 have been seized. All real properties, including those on Schedule B, which I provided you in your packet, have been placed in receivership. The PRT Think Tank was quite thorough."

The empire his father had built was gone.

"Should any of your people be captured and held until trial, our firm will offer our services at the standard fee, provided you can meet those fees. Was there anything else?"

"No, you may leave."

The attorney gathered his papers into his briefcase, locked it up, and then stood and left, a brief nod his only token of respect.

Only when he was gone did Krieg step out from the kitchen area where the others were waited. Like the others, he'd stopped using his mask. Unlike the others, however, he dressed like a business man in slacks and blazer, though he eschewed the tie this time. "How bad?"

"Bad enough," Kaiser said. "All legitimate holdings are gone. The PRT missed a few of our unaffiliated business, but those aren't large enough to launder the amount of funds we'll need."

"Liquid assets?"

"Less than two million." That hurt. Medhall was cautiously valued at four hundred million. One of the reasons why Kaiser was able to keep so many capes was as much to do with the mid six-figure salaries he paid through MedHall as any ideology.

He doubted his own ideology, when it became inconvenient.

Krieg sat in the same spot the attorney previously occupied. With Purity having fled the city with his son and daughter and Night and Fog, Krieg was the only of his two remaining lieutenants he could speak business to. Brad handled the troops, but showed little interest in the financial aspects of the business.

"Gesselschaft?"

"Without Medhall, we've lost our primary source of funding the relationship," Kaiser said. Despite their association, nothing from Gesselschaft was free. Fog and Night were expensive, and held no particular loyalty to Kaiser or Purity. The fact that Kayden managed to raid their personal accounts before she left had as much to do as Fog and Night following her as any idea of loyalty.

"We're good on supplies for the moment," Krieg said. "However, that will be an issue soon. My source in City Hall says that Coven has opened up a secured dock that is already receiving supplies by ship out of Boston. The ship is owned by one of their partner companies. More importantly, people are working."

 _Working._ It was more of a threat than the other members of the Empire could understand. People with steady paychecks, with roofs over their heads and food on their tables, were less likely to turn to something like the Empire.

"Coven." Kaiser snarled. "Fucking kids. Arrogant, asinine children!"

"Powerful children," Krieg noted. "With powerful friends, and a lair that not even Leviathan could damage, much less Alexandria herself. With that Affiliate announcement, they can now call on the Protectorate if they needed to, as well."

"We're bleeding recruits even faster than we are money," Kaiser noted, his anger simmering to the point the table began to deform with metal points.

Krieg shrugged. "Those of us here are here for a reason, my friend. We stand by you no matter the outcome."

Kaiser nodded as he considered his options. While he wielded incredible power through his force of capes (at least for the moment), with the PRT and Protectorate now openly siding with Coven, a straight attack would be more problematic than not.

No, Kaiser needed to take a subtler approach. Perhaps it was time to take a page out of some of his adversaries. "My friends, I think it's time to go visit Boston."

"What's in Boston?" Krieg asked.

"Old friends my father ran out of Brockton Bay. I've heard that the Teeth have wanted to come back to Brockton Bay for years."

Krieg nodded, a slow smile spreading. "And while they are causing chaos…"

"We strike."

"They'll wish they were back in the Birdcage," Krieg said with a vicious grin.

~~Simurgh's Son~~

~~Simurgh's Son~~

"So, Taylor, Harry _and_ Lisa, huh?"

Sherrill grinned as she sat in the cab of her baby, eating away all the garbage Leviathan piled up over the docks while producing tons of recycled material. The cargo hauler that'd come in from Boston with emergency supplies for the city left with forty tons of recycled metals, plastics, paper and pretty much anything else that could have been recycled. All the biological materiel went into the Garden, and anything that couldn't be recycled found its way into the gut of her baby, where it burned like the machine's living heart. Where Sherrill's Trash Monster went, nothing but clear land and sellable materiel remained.

The fact that Coven let her keep half of everything her recycling brought in it was pretty sweet too.

"You think they're doing the wild thing?"

Her companion for the day blushed wildly and shook his head. "I do not think so. Lisa is broken. She cannot enjoy physical love."

"Huh, too bad." She said it because it sounded like something a nice person might say in a situation like that. Sex wasn't something she'd ever really enjoyed, it was always just another step to get high. Now that she was clean, and not even the desire to get high remained, she found the idea of sex didn't mean what it used to either.

More importantly, George just wasn't mean enough to like mean things. She'd learned that the hard way.

As if to confirm her thoughts, he added, "I think she is happier, though."

Sherrill couldn't help comparing George to Skidmark. Skids was the only man she's spent time with other than her dad, so he was her only point of reference.

She'd not give it much thought, but George had really nice teeth. They looked bright white and gleamed when he smiled, which he did a lot. They looked like he took good care of them. Skids teeth were rotting or falling out because of all the Meth. Hell, so were hers before that Panacea chick fixed them all.

George was a bit tubby compared to Skids. Then again, George was also a foot and a half taller. His arms were as thick as Skid's thighs, and though he might be a bit tubby, Sherril had seen him working with some of the DWA shits and fuck if he didn't have some muscle in that fat. Worked all day with a big, gleaming smile on his face.

The biggest difference between them, though, was that George was nice. He didn't do or say anything to hurt anyone else, and he loved playing with Qiana or Stephanie's kids. He didn't talk much because he was so shy, but when he did he made her blink sometimes because what he said was so fucking smart! He was like the exact opposite of Skids in every way.

It left her a little confused and unsure how she was supposed to treat him. She figured she'd get plenty of time to figure it out, though. He was her partner most of the time just because all the others were busy doing something, it seemed, but no one wanted to leave their tinker unguarded.

Qiana was up in the Port—not the neighborhood, but the Graveyard which according to the plan was going to be a fully functional dock soon. They'd even asked Sherrill to starting thinking about something to dredge the bay to open up the waterways. That was going to be the most fuck-tastic kick-ass amphibious boat she ever built, she just knew it.

Meantime, Qiana was using that weird power of hers to melt rock and bring it up to rebuild and even expand the shattered quay. That skinny Taylor chick said it gave the girl practice with her power and the BBDC was paying her as if she were laying actual cement, with a percentage of what the raw materials would have cost.

Like Sherrill, she was keeping half of everything she made.

For her part, Sherril knew Harry rigged up a bunch of bins to hold everything they'd recycled until the first transport ship from Boston arrived. The Magnate Shipping hauler unloaded the emergency supplies for the city, and then loaded up tons of industrial-grade recycled materials in the massive bins. They already had buyers, and the way the gang worked was that she kept half of everything they earned as a result of her power, while the rest went into the company. She didn't understand it all, but what she did understand was that her machines were making money without hurting anybody or getting any kids hooked on the shit.

That was kinda neat, really.

George didn't ride in the cab with her—the cab itself was from the cabin of an old diesel steam shovel, but there was a wide shelf right outside with handholds that was easy enough for him to stand on. Coven rules required no member to go out alone—and in that funky but tough-as-shit spider web armor Skitter and Mage made him, Tiny Man was her escort.

She didn't mind, really. "So you really don't think they're having a little _me-nage_ a' threesome?"

"Miss Paige says it's not like that," he said with a little violet blush to his cheeks.

"Ah, I know, I'm just messing with you. Wouldn't be a bad thing, but that poor girl was goin' nuts. Seems better now."

The huge young man simply nodded along with her. He didn't talk much, but when he did he just seemed to _get_ things. It wasn't like talking to Skidmark at all. Skidmark didn't listen to anyone longer than necessary to get what he wanted. Sometimes he didn't listen at all, he just took. George gave. In a way that confused Sherrill, George was selfless and kind. She didn't know how to handle it, even though she appreciated it.

She was about to tease George with the benefits of a good lay when from the corner of her eye she saw a strange burst of fire. When the flame cleared, she saw a tall, statuesque Asian woman in Hollywood-style blood-red Samurai armor, crowded with small blades with a string of three human skulls hanging from her left shoulder and a helmet that wouldn't look amiss in a Samurai movie.

A six-foot, tree-limb thick cross-bow arched back with a creak of wood before an arrow as long as George's arm shot straight toward her. Sherrill simply stared, momentarily shocked as the arrow visibly changed direction mid-flight to head right toward her eyes.

Then George was there, calling her name as he threw his significant bulk over her body in the now crowded cab. She heard the sound of shattered glass and a grunt from her protector. She actually felt the powerful kick as the energy from the arrow translated through him and into her.

"George! That fucker!"

Sherrill might be a member of the Coven, but she was still the best mother-fucking Tinker in the world! With an angry snarl she hit the Hawaiian-dancer Pez dispenser on her dash and activated the emergency system. Immediately the rig's forcefield came on. Automatic lasers popped up from the cab and started pelting out little beams of electrons at the speed of light.

Through the window she saw the cape burst into flame as if trying to teleport or some dumb shit, only to stumble in confusion. That made it easy for her fuck-it-up lasers to hone in and do what fuck-it-up lasers did.

With their attacker occupied and screaming like the little cock-gobbling bitch she was, she checked on George, who still lay across her lap. "George, baby, are you okay? Talk to me, sweetie!"

"It hit my shoulder blade," he whispered, head slung over her lap. "Can't feel my arm. Hurts bad."

"Ok baby, you just stay right there!" She reached over her head and started pulling the emergency horn. The deep, booming sound of a ship's fog horn rang across the field. In just seconds, Mage appeared on the edge of her Forcefield.

"Sherrill, what happened?"

"Some fuckin' bitch shot an arrow at me!" she said. "George jumped in front of me. Says it hurts bad!"

"Turn off your forcefield!"

She complied, and the moment she did Mage was climbing up to the cab and the open door George half-hung out of.

"Okay, Little Man, hang in there," Mage said. "I'm gonna send you right to Panacea, okay?"

"Ok," George said shakily.

Sherrel felt tears in her eyes at just how young and vulnerable he sounded. Not even a heartbeat later, he was gone. In his absence, the huge arrow fell to the floor of the cab, smearing George's blood on the seat as it did.

"He jumped in front of me," Sherrel said, tears in her eyes. "Why'd he do a dumb thing like that?"

"He must have a saving-people thing," Mage said. He grinned at her, but it looked sad. "Kind of like me. Come on, let's shut this thing down and get you inside. We need to figure out who it was who attacked you, and why."

"You think he's gonna be okay?"

"Sherrel…" He took her hand and looked her in the face. "You were holding your own guts in your hands when Amy healed you. He's gonna be fine. Promise. Now, where's that…ouch."

Another huge arrow slammed into his temple even as he held Sherril's hand, cracking his head against the frame of the cab door before he tumbled out onto the much.

"Mage! You fucker!" She hit her old Atari joystick and brought up the missiles. That little cock-gobbling shit-sucking cunt was going to fucking die in fire!

Then she saw that abruptly the bitch wasn't alone. Not by a fucking long-shot.

"Not again," she hissed.


	58. Acquisition 7

A/N: This past week, I had a poll on my profile asking a simple question. Were people okay with my offering to post a chapter anytime the previous chapter got a 100 signed, non-spam reviews? I had over a 100 unique votes, 71% of which said yes. So, beginning today, that's my offer. If this chapter gets a 100 signed, non-spam reviews today, I'll post the next chapter tomorrow morning. If it gets a 100 reviews by tomorrow, i'll post the next chapter Monday morning. And I'll continue in that fashion until the story is done. If the chapters don't get a 100 reviews, don't worry I'll continue posting on Saturdays like normal. I just have a unique window this holiday and thought I'd throw this out. No matter what, I'll finish the story. But the sooner it gets posted, the sooner I can get to _Invincible_.

And for those who pointed out how badly I mangled Sherrel's name, I hopefully caught the mistakes going forward. These weren't typoes, but legitimate mistakes on my part. I don't edit posted chapters, but I absolutely try to learn going forward.

Thank you for reading.

* * *

 **Acquisition 7.7**

If there was one trait about her boyfriend that Taylor found simultaneously irritating, confusing and adorable, it was how utterly sappy he was.

Being raised as a slave by villains should have hardened him, she always thought. It should have given him the emotional callouses necessary to do hard things and make hard decisions. In some ways, he had, too. While his killing of Lung in the Birdcage was an act of survival, his execution of Acidbath and the murderer's lieutenants was a cold-hearted power play to get to Taylor.

Which made the whole thing sappy again, because he only did it to get to her.

When she woke up on the morning that their in-house pre-Cog predicted was the day the Empire 88 would renege on their peace pact and attack, it was to find Harry propped up on his shoulder staring intently at both her and Lisa. He could have melted ice with the utter, mind-boggling adoration he wore on his expression. So much so, his eyes were a little red, as if he was about to start crying.

She restrained an urge to slap the silly out of him. "Really, Harry?"

"What?"

Lisa, who was wrapped up like a cocoon in her pajamas with Thomas the Teddy secured under her right arm, kept her eyes closed. "You're staring at us while we're sleeping," she said. She didn't sound sleepy at all. "It's a little creepy."

"I'm just…you're just…want breakfast?"

He rolled out of his bed, threw another pair of pajamas over the pajama bottoms he wore to sleep, and rushed from the room.

"Doofus." Taylor sat up from her position in the corner of the ridiculously oversized bed and propped her back against the wall. She brought her legs into lotus position and looked around the room. The sun was already up, and the dust motes in the air danced in the beams of light that shone through the blinds. In just the short time they'd had before and since their Birdcage sojourn, she'd come to view the room as her home.

"Taylor, does it bother you that he loves me too?"

Taylor looked to where Lisa now also sat up, her teddy bear held protectively in her lap. She stared back with a neutral expression, as if she weren't sure of the answer. Given her particular power, that seemed odd. Couldn't she tell?

When Taylor considered the question, though, she understood. Lisa wouldn't ask a question like that for no reason. She asked not because she couldn't tell what Taylor felt, but because Taylor herself wasn't sure.

"I've never had anyone in my life like him," she said aloud.

"Taylor, _no one's_ ever had anyone like him in their life," Lisa pointed out. "He's the reincarnation of an immortal wizard in a teen-aged boy's body. It's like a switch when he goes from being the sex-obsessed pervert to the eternal sorcerer. And yet they're mostly the same person. What's confusing is that the sex-obsessed perv would love to have a threesome, the eternal sorcerer…fucking expects it."

"And what does the boyfriend think?"

"The boyfriend loves you so much it makes him hurt a little," Lisa said with a shrug. "Enough to cry."

"He was looking at you too."

Lisa met her eyes squarely, but her smile looked wistful. "I know."

 _Hence the question._ Looking at Lisa, though, Taylor began to see something else for the first time. That wistful smile. The sense of melancholy. "Holy shit, you love him too."

"Of course, I do. Don't think I kept it a secret. Difference is, I can't…I can't…" She stopped, almost panting. "I just can't…be that for him. Not for anybody. More importantly, I won't be what breaks you two up. I've seen how angry you can get at him for looking at other girls. So how mad do you get when he looks at me?"

It was a valid question. Taylor still felt a little miffed about him vanishing all of Glory Girl's clothes, though she passed that off because the misguided hero was trying to kill him at the time. His tendency to make girl's clothes disappear was a deeply offensive and sexist thing.

Until she realized, only recently, that he did it because he was so deeply programmed not to hit girls he was almost impotent around them. Not just her, but any of the girls. Qiana could walk up and sucker punch him, and the worst he might do is shout and scream. On the other hand, he walked in on her and Paige having sex, so voluntarily or not Qiana was not indelibly linked to one of his long-time fantasies.

"Shit, my boyfriend is a fucking perv."

"Believe me, I know. I've caught him undressing every girl around him with his eyes, except Dinah Alcott and Vista."

"Why them?"

Lisa shrugged. "The perv looks at every woman around him as a sex object. The immortal sorcerer in him makes him look at every child as his own. And because that's how he views them, Dinah and Vista could grow up to by the hottest, sexiest women in the world and he'd still only see them as daughter figures. His conditioning runs pretty deep."

"What about me?"

Lisa shrugged again. "That's just it. You're his everything. In his mind, even if he never voices it, you're his wife. He'll stay with you for as long as you live, if you can put up with him that long."

"And he'll never cheat?"

"He would never sleep with another woman unless you were there with him. He'll be faithful to you for the rest of his life, but he'll only be a monogamist if you make him be one."

"So if you stripped naked…" Taylor shook her head. "Stupid question, of course he would. Lisa, why are you asking all this?"

The wistful smile became strained. "Remember what you said, when you hit me? Before you dragged me kicking and screaming to this bed?"

"I told you not to betray me."

"Before that. You said I was the first friend you had after Emma. Thing is, at first I wasn't really a friend. I recruited you because Coil wanted me to. I knew what to say and what to do because that's what my power did. I knew you wanted me to be your new Emma, and I stepped into the role because it made it easy to manipulate you. Like I told you, once, I'm not a nice person. But then…"

Taylor watched, astonished, as Lisa bent over her teddy bear until her head touched the comforter. She made an odd, barely audible squeal and squeezed her stuffed animal so hard she flattened it.

"Lisa?" Concerned, Taylor gently touched her shoulder.

When the thinker sat back up, her eyes glistened and her nose was red. "But then…" she continued in a thick voice. "Then you came for me. You came for me, even though I had a fucking bomb in my head and Coil threatened…me with…his men. You saved me, and my power said it was because you loved me. You didn't want to use me for anything, you didn't care about my power. You and Harry loved me, and wanted to save me, and you did and I didn't deserve it. I don't deserve you guys. I just…I don't deserve to be here with you, in this bed, and I…"

Taylor scooted from the corner until her back rested against the side wall and gave her a better angle to pull her sobbing friend onto her lap. Lisa fell over across her thighs, still clutching Thomas the Bear, as she sobbed. Taylor simply held her friend, until the worst of the sobs ended. The two girls simply sat in silence for the longest time, numb from the brief exchange.

"Taylor?"

"Yeah, Lisa?"

"Love you."

"Love you, too."

"I think…I love Harry, too."

"I know. And I think I'm okay with that. But if he tries to come up with an excuse to drag Stephanie into this room…"

Lisa sat up and laughed. "Or Sherrel."

"Or Imp."

"Oh, I don't need an invitation," Aisha said from the desk, where she'd been evidently sitting the entire time. She had an actual bag of popcorn in her hand. "Are you two gonna fuck? I mean, I came in here for a show."

Taylor had a pillow on a straight path to Aisha's face in a split second, sending her toppling over the back of her chair and sending popcorn flying around the room. "You are so getting bed bugs, lice and ticks for this, you little bitch!" Taylor shouted.

"Get her legs!" Lisa cried from the bed.

"Get whose legs?"

Taylor straightened, trying to figure out why her pillow was on the floor and the room looked like a balloon filled with popcorn went off.

In the distance, they heard a booming foghorn. A split second later Harry popped back into their room, wide-eyed. "Sherrel's under attack. Where's my super suit?"

Taylor pointed to their bathroom. He ran inside, just two seconds later he emerged fully costumed. He ran to the door, paused, then came back in, wrapped his arms around Taylor, and kissed her so hard she could barely breath after. "Think this is it, we should get…Lisa? Why is Imp's popcorn can in here?"

Taylor and Lisa shared a long look. "We'll tell you about it later. Go help Sherrel, we'll get suited up and get the Protectorate."

When he was gone, Lisa walked quickly to Taylor's desk and wrote down a note. IMP PRANKED US. REVENGE.

Taylor nodded without speaking, before she too ran to the bathroom to get suited up. Lisa did too. They found Paige, Stephanie, Imp and Dinah in the kitchen. Paige and Stephanie were holding the three toddlers worriedly. Even as they watched, Qiana came running in from the back, flanked by a dozen former dockworkers who now worked for Coven.

"What's going on? I heard the foghorn," she said.

"Hundred percent chance Teeth attacking," Dinah said with a worried frown. "Sixty-seven point eight two two five percent chance Empire attacks too."

That number confused Taylor for a moment, but Lisa merely nodded. "They're using the Teeth to try and lure all of Coven to committing. They can't get us behind inside the buildings, so they need to lure us out."

Jess appeared in the doorway in her wheelchair. "What the fuck's going on?"

Lisa looked around at all of their capes, then matches gazes with Taylor. "I'll get the portkeys."

"I'll call the Protectorate," Taylor said, as if they shared the same breath.

"Thinkers," Qiana snorted. "Fuckin' bullshit."

~~Simurgh's Son~~

~~Simurgh's Son~~

"What the hell is that crazy bitch doing?" Hookwolf snorted.

Max had to admit he was confused as well. The plan was for Butcher to teleport in to Coven's attention, then teleport out again. That would get all the little kids riled up, which would get the whole city riled up, which would increase patrols and make it that much easy for a new, more ruthless Empire to take its vengeance.

Instead, the insane cape burst into flame but stayed right where she was. Which made her a target for that crazy slut tinker. Butcher started yelping and running about as lasers took pot-shots at her from the roof of what was supposed to be a recycling machine.

"I hate fucking tinkers," Max muttered. "Send the signal. If the Teeth want their leader in one piece, then they'd better go in now."

"And us?" Krieg knelt on Max's right, opposite Hookwolf. "Are we going in?"

"Let's let the kids come out to play first," Max said. "I don't want us going in until we have all our targets in the open. Save Skitter and Mage for me, though. Hurt them all you want, but don't kill them."

Hookwolf gave him a look. "Kid killed Lung in the Birdcage, Max. I'll give 'em hell, but kill him? Not likely."

~~Simurgh's Son~~

~~Simurgh's Son~~

When Harry reached the rig, he felt his stomach drop when he saw Little Man draped motionlessly across Sherrel's lap. Sherrel herself was cursing up a storm and firing a fusillade of lasers at a weird woman in Samurai cosplay on the other side of the muddy field that would soon be a hotel. The cosplayer kept bursting into flames, and every time she did Harry felt his anti-apparation wards trip.

He looked closer and saw the cosplayer was a woman—a very tall woman, with a very large long-bow dressed in a silly Samurai get-up, with three not-so-silly skulls dragged like a necklace around her neck. Though she was screaming and billowing in anger, the cape was also tanking laser blasts that could have killed anyone short of a Brute 3.

A portkey sent George on his way to Panacea—the Brute's bones were unbreakable, but the rest of him was just as squishy as anyone else.

"You think he's gonna be okay?"

He stopped for a moment, caught by the urgency and fear in Sherrel's voice. He glanced at her, and for the first time he saw no hint of the trash-talking, filthy drug addict known as Squealer. She looked so…young.

"Sherrel…" He took her hand and made sure to lock her eyes with his. "You were holding your own guts in your hands when Amy healed you. He's gonna be fine. Promise. Now, where's that…ouch."

At that moment, something big and powerful punched him in the side of the head so hard he bounced the other side of his head off the frame of the cab door. His foot slipped and he fell into the caked, dried mud below where Sherrel worked.

He could hear her screaming, but over the ringing in his ears he could also hear the servos of a missile launcher pop up—a launcher that could not possibly have fit in the roof of the cab. It looked almost cartoonish—like Wiley E. Coyote pulling out a sledge hammer from a hidden pocket or…or like fitting an entire evidence room in a back pack.

"Right. Powers."

He started to regain his feet when he saw a massive, barbed arrow in the ground, easily as long as his arm. A glance up showed him that the Samurai cape was still trying to flame out, and was still having no luck.

Samurai schtick. Why was that…? Oh, yeah.

"Sherrel, don't kill her!"

"What? Why the fuck not? That cock-cobbling ass-sucking cunt-whore shot George!"

 _Now that sounds like the Squealer we all knew and love,_ Harry thought. "That's Butcher! From the Teeth! You kill the Butcher, you become the Butcher, and go fucking nuts! Don't kill her!"

"Then what about the fucking army?"

"What…oh. Right. Army."

Indeed, when he looked where she pointed, Harry had the distinct pleasure of seeing what looked like an army right out of an old Mad Max movie. At least fifty people in mohawks, tight leather pants and blades, spikes and spines scrambled over the berms of debris that they'd formed up around their lands while working. All of them carried guns and all were screaming wildly.

Harry reached up to his ear and touched the All-Come signal.

"I don't want to alarm anyone, but we're under attack by the Teeth."

" _We figured. Which ones?"_ Lisa asked.

"Um, all of them, I think."

" _We go with our original plan, then._ _Try to hold them off as long as you can, we'll be out shorty. Hang on, you two."_

Bullets began biting at the ground around Harry's feet. Of more concern were the capes. From what he read while working for Coil, the Teeth had some heavy hitters. Including…

"Holy fuck, is that a Gatlin gun?"

The fusillade of bullets from the huge rotating gun the Butcher fired into his chest suggested YES.

"Fuck that!" Sherrel announced. She hit something on the dash of her monster recycler and the missiles launched. Each of the ten missiles were the size of Harry's leg and shot out on a contrail of twisting smoke, somehow targeting the largest groupings of Teeth soldiers.

The air between the recycler and the missiles glistened, as if someone had thrown floating diamonds in the air. The missiles struck the glistening spots and exploded, one after the other.

That might have been the end of it, if these weren't tinker-tech missiles. Harry couldn't help but admire the sudden billow of white phosphorescent flame that blasted out from each explosion along the same trajectory as the missile itself. Whatever glittery field stopped the missiles did nothing to stop the fire.

The cape who threw up the diamond field and the five Teeth grunts that followed had just a moment to scream before a wall of white-hot flaming phosphorous slammed into their bodies like a brick wall, only a wall that instantly turned them to charcoal.

"So much for struggling…SHIT."

The pain hit Harry like a _cruciatus_ , throbbing through ever cell of his body all at once. In the cab, Sherrel screamed and writhed about, while Harry fell to his knees and tried his best to suborn the agony with occlumency. With effort, he saw the Samurai wanna-be striding toward him with rotating cannon that looked like she ripped it from the nose of an Army Warthog.

" _Butcher can cause pain,"_ Lisa helpfully told him through his charm.

"No fucking shit _!"_ Harry screamed.

Abruptly the pain ended. Harry stumbled to his knees and looked up just in time to see a massive swarm of flying insects, more than he could possibly count, descend like a biblical plague on Butcher.

"That's right, you bitch! That's my girlfriend!" Harry shouted with glee.

The Gardens housed millions of insects picked by Taylor not just for their agricultural value, but for their combat potential. At that moment, she'd deployed almost a third of them, and the air darkened from their wrath. The Teeth soldiers staggered about desperately swatting at huge clouds of bugs that didn't just obscure their sight, but attacked their eyeballs. Even as Harry watched, dozens of Teeth fanatics fell to their knees before collapsing entirely to the ground.

Abruptly a deep, reverberating roar blasted through the plaza. All the bugs suddenly lost their concentrated flight and began scattering away. A giant, four-legged creature roughly the size of a bus bound through the fallen Teeth soldiers. A thin, pale woman with long, lank black hair rode on its back. Her arms were covered in what looked like red gauntlets that ended in equally red blades. The beast snorted, looked around the field until it saw them, and then charged.

A flaming wall of lava shot up from the ground. Harry turned in relief to see Qiana running toward him, flanked a feminine figure whose curves vaguely reminded him of Lisa in one of Taylor's and Harry's runic web costumes, and by Stephanie in her own costume.

A brief search of the field located Taylor running behind, a second massive swarm forming up behind her.

Unfortunately, the lava wall hissed and then shattered as the changer trump, Animos of the Teeth, blasted through with the red-armed Teeth cape riding on his back as if he were a horse.

Harry removed his staff from his pocket.

"Wanna see something cool?" he asked Qiana as she reached his side. "I've always wanted to do this."

Qiana shrugged. "Just do something, don't care what."

"'Kay." Harry pointed his staff at the approaching monster. " _ACME!"_

A five hundred pound anvil shot from the tip of his staff faster than a bullet. It actually made an odd, zinging/sucking sound when it struck Animos in his head, then continued through his body before exploding out the back in a spray of gore. The cape on his back, most certainly Hemorragia, flew forward with a confused expression when she rolled to her feet. She picked herself up, turned to see the shattered remnants of one of the Teeth's heaviest hitters, and then turned back to scream at Harry.

Lifting both arms, she began to shoot what looked like crystalline blood bullets from her hands.

"ACME!"

She stopped shooting and crouched down to duck an anvil, which meant she didn't have time to move when the baby ground piano fell from the sky with a humming sound and crushed her into the dried mud.

"You know that's really fucked up, right?" Qiana asked.

"Yeah. Probably. But Taylor told me I can't hold back just because they have boobs."

Qiana snorted. Then hit the back of his head. "That bitch was flat. Doesn't count."

Rather than dwell on the abuse he received from his team mates, Harry noticed how Butcher was using her flame outs to burn the swarms that got too close to her. Grimacing, Harry used his staff to sketch some hasty Runes into the mud, powerful them up as he went along. When he was done, he touched his protean charm.

"Taylor, I'm going to go get Butcher."

" _Go._ "

Since the anti-apparation wards were keyed to him, it was easy to appear right behind the tall, powerful woman, wrap an arm around her neck, and dis-apparate with her right back to the spot he marked.

In return, he got a nice little helping of HOLY-MARY-AND-JOSEPH-THAT-HURTS. Harry stumbled away, trying not to scream and failing miserably. Qiana, the newly arrived Stephanie and the oddly silent Lisa all dropped to her knees, screaming in agony under the Butcher's unrelenting power.

Naturally, that's when Empire 88 attacked.


	59. Acquisition 8

A/N: I was blown away by the response to my proposal yesterday. Genuinely blown away. I promised a chapter every day for each day I got a hundred reviews, and all of you stepped up and said the story was worth the time to review. I can't thank you enough for reading.

So, here is the next chapter. And just like the last, a hundred signed reviews for this chapter will get a new chapter the very next day. Thank you all for reading.

* * *

 **Acquisition 7.8**

On Kaiser's right, Krieg shifted momentarily as he watched Mage shoot what looked like an anvil _through_ the Teeth's second most powerful cape. On his other side, Hookwolf said, "Fuck me."

Both men went utterly silent when a grand piano appeared out of nowhere twelve feet above Hemorragia and crushed her into paste.

" _This is Victor,_ " their radio earpieces all announced. " _Eyes on Target. Skitter, Schism, Smolder, Canary and Tattletale have all left base and are approaching the theatre."_

Below, Mage teleported into the middle of the fight, grabbed the Butcher, and then teleported her to another spot close to where he stood before. Almost instantly, the Butcher inflicted her pain-inducing power on Mage and Smolder, bringing both to their knees.

"We're not going to get another chance at this," Hookwolf said somberly.

"Victor, do you have a clear shot on any targets?"

" _There's no need to be insulting, Kaiser. I have them_ all _in my sights."_

"The following targets in order: Skitter, head shot. Tattletale, head shot. Smolder, Head shot. Canary and Schism, wing them."

" _And so ends the career of Taylor Hebert,_ " Victor said.

The shot rang out from the other side of the battleground, barely audible over the chaos of the fight below.

Somehow, even in the midst of his pain, Kaiser had the distinct pleasure of hearing Mage scream his lover's name in anguish.

"All of you, none of this works if we let them scamper back into their lairs," Kaiser said. "Rune, Menja, Fenja, you cut them off. Krieg, Stormtiger, Hookwolf, Cricket…you're with me. To battle, brothers and sisters!"

It sounded a little melodramatic even in Kaiser's ears, but no one called him on it. Instead, the massed might of the Empire's surviving capes rushed over the berm of mud and debris and crashed into the battle.

As he ran, Kaiser saw how Rune threw cars with unerring precision at the doors of the two buildings. Unfortunately, the cars couldn't pass through the odd protective shielding that surrounded them, but the girl used her brains for a change and just kept throwing objects with her power, building a barrier around the edge of the shield.

Menja and Fenja, his beautiful Valkyries, each had grown to twenty feet a piece and took positions in front of the barriers that Rune continued to build.

Most of the Teeth capes were down or dead, but at least twenty of their soldiers remained. The fools knew enough to know not to attack the Empire, not after the agreement Kaiser reached with their mongrel leader.

Instead of dealing with the detritus, he and his colleagues rushed toward the embattled heroes without resistance. Even as they ran, Kaiser heard another shot ring out and the figure in the silken costume with the voluptuous curves dropped to the ground like so much garbage.

They were going to do it, Kaiser could feel it in his steel. Hookwolf charged where the black girl and Mage stumbled as Butcher had to release her pain hold. They were immediately forced to hold off Teeth soldiers. Max made his way to his beautiful Valkyries to ensure Coven could not escape. The others split off accordingly, with Cricket and Storm Tiger following Hookwolf, while Krieg followed Kaiser while Victor kept over watch.

Even as Kaiser ran, he saw the black girl, Smolder, drop as another of Victor's shots rang out.

Abruptly, everything went to hell.

Kaiser did not immediately understand why everything got so dark until he looked up and saw not the sun, but nearly the entire sky obscured by a black, moving cloud. The sound of insect wings took on a sinister hum that drowned out the roars of the dinosaurs moving toward…

 _What. The. Fuck._

Kaiser slowed to a stumble, dumbfounded, as a pair of six-foot-tall lizards with long ripping claws pounced on Cricket, tearing the woman apart in a shower of blood and animal screeching.

"Cricket!" Hookwolf cried.

His cry was cut off by a bone-shaking _BOOM_ that, even in his changer state, removed his head. Kaiser's eyes were drawn to the figure that Victor shot second, whom they all thought was Tattletale.

They were wrong. Somehow, the figure survived Victor's sniper shot almost unscathed, had climbed back to her feet, and somehow materialized a massive anti-materiel gun. Even as he watched, she shot Hookwolf again and again, center of mass, blasting through his steel changer state until the last shot did not hit steel hooks, but rather bear flesh. Hookwolf didn't even manage a sound before the entirety of his upper torso exploded.

In the sky, Rune screamed as she fell, surrounded by a horde of insects so thick she was barely visible. Even as he watched, the massive dark cloud split into tendrils. One dove for a spot on a distant berm. Kaiser could hear both Victor, and his ever-present partner and spouse Othala, screaming in agony.

He spun about as Krieg fell to another tendril of flying insects. The fliers, though, were not what killed him. A living carpet of ants swarmed up Krieg's pants. The man had only a few moments to scream before he collapsed into silence, completely covered by bugs.

"It's a trap!" Stormtiger shouted. Another velociraptor died screeching before a blade of his compressed air. Four more pounced on him and ripped his stomach open before he had a chance to even scream.

"No," Kaiser shouted.

He gathered his steel and unleashed it in a line that bisected four of the impossible dinosaurs. He turned to find another target when he heard his beloved Fenja scream. He spun around just in time to see Armsmaster, of all people, brandishing his hated halberd as he finished cutting Fenja's Achilles heel. She shrank even as she fell. Kaiser could see the carpet of ants sweeping toward her.

"Jessica!" Menja screamed. She swept her spear toward Armsmaster in a blow that should have killed the hated Tinker.

Somehow, he spun aside from the blow, batted the spear away, and rolled forward to sweep his halberd again at the giantesses' right leg. The end of his halberd had a strangely blurred blade that swept through her power-enhanced skin and bone, sending her screaming to the ground just like her twin sister.

"Oh come on, Armsy, don't kill the playboy twins, please!"

Kaiser turned, eyes wide, as he heard the arrogant, whining tones of Mage. All around, though he searched, Kaiser could not find any of his Empire still standing. In fact, he couldn't see any of them at all because of a massive, rotating wall of insects that slowly began to funnel around him.

He framed himself in steel, secure at least in the knowledge that Skitter's hated insects could not touch him, when a figure moved through the wall of cloud untouched. It was Mage, staff in hand, utterly unharmed from his battle with the Butcher—a cape even Kaiser would not have wanted to fight single-handedly.

"How?" It was the only word he could think to say.

Mage snorted. "Bloody tosser. The most powerful pre-cog on the planet lives with us. You think we didn't see this coming? Granted, getting Armsmaster and Miss Militia here used up some of my emergency portkeys, and it was a gamble that the runes on our costumes would stop your sniper, but one way or the other, this was going to end today."

"You think this is going to end?" Kaiser's heart thudded painfully in his chest as he glared with all the hatred of his forefather's at this arrogant young shit. "You think you've won? I'm going to kill everything you love, everything you…"

Mage spun his staff, said, "Acme!" Suddenly an anvil shot toward Kaiser like a bullet. The leader of the Empire formed an instant honeycomb of steel that slowed the anvil from lethal speed to just a painful thump that hit against his chest. Rather than feel relief to have survived, he gathered his power to strike back when he saw the tip of Mage's staff touch the anvil he still held against his chest.

"Portus."

The sickening sensation that followed almost made him throw up. He sealed his armor completely, creating a small envelope of air. He thought briefly that he must have been teleported to water, because he could feel his steel flex outward. It also grew cold—impossibly cold. He began to spin within his pocket of steel so fast he did finally throw up. His vomit splattered out and away from him, coating the inside of his steel shell, where it quickly frosted over.

"What's happening!" He screamed the words, but in his tiny space they bounced back painfully to his ears. "Where am I?"

It was too much, too much!

Max Anders released his steel all at once. He had only moments to stare, dumbfounded, at an impossible huge moon, before his eyes boiled out of their sockets from the vacuum of outer space. He did not have time for any final thoughts before he died.

~~Simurgh's Son~~

~~Simurgh's Son~~

Taylor walked tiredly across the bloody battlefield. Harry stood in the middle, his costume free of mud or blood despite the mess surrounding them. The last of his transfigured velociraptors reverted back to a wide-eyed, horrified Teeth soldier. Without looking, Mage flicked his hand toward the men, producing a red stunner that sent the two men folding unconscious into the bloody mud.

He glanced up at her, eyes a little red. "You okay?"

"My chest hurts. I'm almost glad I'm so flat, if I were built any better that bullet would have hit my breast."

"As a complete expert on women's breasts, I can assure you you're not as flat as you seem to think," Harry intoned somberly.

Before she could come up with a good response, he had her completely wrapped up in a hug, his lips buried in the seam between her armored head piece and the body of her costume, so that he could kiss her bare skin.

"I knew you would be safe," he whispered to her. "I knew the runes would protect you. But when you fell, I thought my heart was going to stop."

"Harry, I'm fine. You're being sappy again."

"I don't care. I love you, and when you get shot I have the right to be sappy."

"Is Butcher secure?" Armsmaster demanded.

Taylor tried not to shiver as Harry's sigh sent goosebumps up and down his spine. "And there goes sappy time."

Taylor turned to see Armsmaster approaching. Miss Militia had removed the protective woven and charmed head piece that made the enemy think she was Tattletale, and had replaced it with her trademark red, white and blue bandanna.

Tattletale was making her way from their headquarters. Like the others, she wore her Darwin Bark-woven costume with its protective runes, but didn't bother with a mask. "So how high did you send Kaiser?" she asked Harry.

"Oh, about two hundred miles," Harry said. "And yes, Armsmaster, Butcher's secure. At least for now. See?"

They looked toward the spot Harry drew his down and dirty anti-apparation and containment jinxes. The spot was completely covered a basalt monolith, with Smolder standing nearby with a satisfied smirk.

"I can't believe we got them all," Miss Militia said, wide-eyed. "The Empire and the Teeth at once? Amazing."

"The body count might be an issue," Armsmaster noted coolly. "Especially the…."

Having a good idea what the Protectorate hero was going to say, Taylor cut him off.

"Rune's still alive. So is Othala and the twins. Right now, they know that if they move or grow, five hundred thousand fire ants will bite them all at once. They're covered up, but they're alive. Same with Othala and Rune."

Miss Militia looked from Taylor to Mage with a confused frown. "Why only the female capes?"

"Because someone is a fucking pussy when it comes to taking out bitches," Smolder announced as she joined him.

"Hey, I took out that Blood-bender lady!" Harry said. "With a piano! You saw it and everything. And my veloceraptors took out Cricket."

"They were both ugly as shit, too," Qiana said. "Face it, you're a pussy when it comes to women."

"I…Taylor, that's not true! Defend me, my love!"

"From what? You are a pussy when it comes to girls. You _told_ me you can't hit a girl, even when she's beating the ever-loving shit out of you."

"Glory Girl," Tattletale said in a poorly disguised cough.

"Hey, I've fought Glory Girl off!"

"Vanishing her costume is not fighting her off, it's fucking embarrassing and sexist!"

"I told you, Taylor, she pad's her bras. Nothing to be jealous of!"

"Qiana?" Taylor asked.

Qiana obliged with a heavy slap to the back of his head. "Ow! What about the rules?"

"I didn't hit you," Taylor said with a smirk.

"And I owe you," Qiana said.

"True. I know for a fact you don't pad yours."

Another slap, but Harry was grinning too much to care.

As they stood talking, the first PRT and BBPD vans began to arrive to clean up the mess.

"Anyone see George?"

Taylor looked over her shoulder at Sherrel, who stepped through the bloody battlefield without a second look at the blood. Instead, she was looking for Little Man.

"I am here!"

George strode toward them, a happy grin on his face. He was not wearing a shirt, and his cargo pants hung rather low. George was a large man. He did not have a defined body like a body builder. In fact, if Taylor were honest with himself, the young man was a little…

Okay, he had a definite tummy. He was strong as an ox, but his stomach definitely preceded him as he walked toward Sherrel.

She in turn walked right up to him, barely even reaching the middle of his chest, and stared berating him.

"What were you thinking, jumping in front of me like that? Are you crazy? That dumb bitch had arrows, I had fucking lasers and missiles. And a forcefield! You hear me, Georgie? You don't go doing crazy shit like that again. Now come on, we need to get you a shirt!"

She took the huge young man's hand and dragged him toward the headquarters. Though she no longer dressed entirely like a low-end prostitute, she seemed to have very revealing taste in clothing. Her halter-top barely contained her still ample chest, while her hip-hugging jeans just reinforced that she was a curvy woman. When not covered in filth or strung out on drugs, Taylor had to admit the woman was surprisingly attractive.

George listened to her with hunched shoulders, but as they walked away Taylor could see him glancing down at his companion with a confused smile.

"Cleavage, the most powerful weapon in the cosmos," Harry announced with a dreamy smile.

Somehow, during the exchange, Taylor lost sight of Miss Militia and Armsmaster. With her insects, it was a simply matter to find them again. They'd joined the PRT and police teams. Already, forensics specialists were spread out across the field, marking everything.

"Think we'll get some peace when word of this gets out?" Harry asked.

"The Protectorate is going to take credit," Taylor predicted.

Tattletale grinned and held up a high-end digital camcorder. "They'll try. I had these all over the place for security. We'll get the story out, and people will know not to fuck with Coven."

"What about Butcher?" Taylor asked.

"Well, I have a few sopophorous plants ready to harvest," Harry said. "If I could get a sloth brain, I could brew up a draught of living death that would put her in suspended animation for as long as we need."

"I think the Protectorate has her handled," Lisa noted.

They turned and watched as a large backhoe rolled into their land. The backhoe dug under the earth and scooped up Qiana's entire basalt prison.

"Did you put basalt under the runes?" Harry asked.

"Yup," Qiana said.

"Then I call that done and done," Harry declared happily. He then looked at the woman around him. "So, George and Sherrel, eh? Think they're doing the wild thing?"

~~Simurgh's Son~~

~~Simurgh's Son~~

That night, Aisha stepped out of the shower in the room she and Dinah shared. Her quiet friend was at her desk, finishing her homework from their tutoring that morning. Imp thought it sucked ass that they were in tutoring while the rest of Coven was taking out the Teeth and Empire. They didn't even hear anything in the sublevel where they and the other DWA kids took classes, until it was all over.

"Shower's yours," she said as she dried her hair.

Dinah nodded, finished whatever it was that she was doing, but didn't go to the shower. Instead, she turned and stared at Aisha.

"What?"

"Taylor and Lisa are mad at you," the pre-cog said.

"No shit," Aisha muttered. "Putting ants in my ice cream. What a fucking…"

"You hurt them. You hurt their feelings."

"Oh fuck their feelings!" Aisha said. "So what, bad things happened. My mom's a fucking crack whore and my brother and dad are dead. No one cares about my feelings!"

"They did. I do."

The answer brought Aisha up short. "What?"

"You came with me, to protect me. You're my friend. I don't want you to get hurt."

Aisha blew off the uncomfortable fuzzy-wuzzy shit. "Nah, I'll be fine."

She lay down in her bed, only for it to explode under her and blast her out onto the floor in what felt like a never-ending shower of…popcorn? What the fuck?

"Also, I really didn't want to sleep in popcorn tonight," Dinah said with a sigh. "Lisa and Taylor are mad at you, and Harry does whatever they want."

"Oh, I am going to…oh shit. OH SHIT."

A huge pillar of ants rose up from the popcorn until it assumed a vaguely human shape. "STRIKE ONE. THREE STRIKES AND YOUR OUT."

The pile of bugs sank back down to the floor. Aisha watched, horrified, as the ants and other bugs began carrying the popcorn into a little hole in the corner of the room she'd never noticed before.

"The fuck was that about?" she said, when she could speak.

Dinah walked over to her, sat down, and put an arm over Aisha's shoulder. "Please don't sneak into their rooms again," she said softly. "Please."

"You in this with them?"

"No. But I can see what happens if you do. You're…you're my best friend, Aisha. Please don't go into their rooms again."

Aisha might not have had the book smarts her younger friend had, but she wasn't stupid. Between Skitter's threat and what Dinah was saying, the message was clear enough.

"Fine. But I'm gonna get 'em back somehow."

Dinah shrugged. "Okay."

"And you're going to help."

"Okay."

Aisha grinned. "Fuck yeah. We'll show 'em."

~~Simurgh's Son~~

~~Simurgh's Son~~

"So," Harry began as they got ready for bed.

"Don't say it," Taylor warned.

"Now we know why they called her Squealer," he finished with a grin.

Lisa bopped him with her Teddy. "Pig. What they have is very sweet."

"And loud," Harry said. "Good thing I popped those silencing charms on before Dinah heard anything."

None of them commented on the "punishment" they formulated for Aisha, nor did they expect that to be the end of it. Hopefully it at least drew a line in the sand.

Over the past few days they had developed a bit of a routine. Lisa still did all of her evening prep in her room, giving Harry and Taylor a chance to shower or shave or otherwise do their evening toiletries. Harry found himself a little disappointed they didn't do more that night, but he figured after the battle Taylor was tired.

He still had the faintest headache from Butcher's _Cruciatus-_ like power.

So, he brushed his teeth and took a shower and climbed into his pajama bottoms, while Taylor combed her now shoulder-length hair as she stared at herself in the mirror of the bathroom. She looked so calm and contemplative that he couldn't help but drift behind her and give her a hug. "What are you thinking?"

"About the future."

"The future? Like space ships and monorails and such?"

She grinned. "No, doofus. I mean…us. Our future."

"That's easy. We save the world, get married, and then destroy the world by having offspring. Maybe not in that order, but that's the idea, anyway."

"You'd want to marry me?"

Harry stared at her as if she were an alien. "Would I? If you said yes, I'd apparate you to a church right now. Want a diamond ring? I'll get you a diamond ring. Flowers? Anything you want."

"You're getting sappy again."

He shrugged. "I love you. Can't help it."

"And what about Lisa?"

In some ways, Harry could be oblivious. But one thing he was well attuned to was his girl. He heard in those words a fragility he'd not sensed in her since that morning in the Birdcage, when they finally opened up to each other. He pulled the other vanity stool over so he could sit beside her, close enough that his knee rested against her thigh.

"If…" He stopped and thought some more. "Taylor, I'm not joking, okay? If…if you wanted to run off, just me and you, and leave Lisa and the rest behind, I would."

"Even though she's prettier than me?"

He gently reached across and cupped her cheek. "Taylor?" He leaned over and kissed her gently. "Lisa is pretty. Beautiful even. But so are you. You're beautiful because I love you. And you love me back."

She stared at him as if she were trying to memorize every feature of his face. "You believe that, don't you?"

"I'd be glad to spend the rest of my life proving it to you, too." He leaned over, hand still cupping her cheek, and kissed her again. They parted.

"Now, if you decide you're bisexual and want to bring Lisa in, I won't object," he pointed out, equally sincerely.

"God you're a fucking perv," she muttered, even as she chuckled. She kissed him. "Come on."

Harry's heart started racing. She had that _Your-about-to-get-laid_ look that he preferred so much more than her Murder-Rage Glare of Death. "Okay!"

She took his hand and led him into the bedroom, but he stumbled in confusion when Lisa was already in the bed, wrapped up as always in her pajamas, with Teddy tucked in her arms.

"Oh, hey, Lisa, ready for bed?" He was proud of how much he kept the disappointment out of his voice.

She smirked. "Don't sound so excited."

Okay, so maybe he didn't keep all the disappointment out of his voice. "Sorry, was thinking about something else. So, all the kids are tucked in, Aisha's been thoroughly pranked and the wards on our door mean we're safe. To bed, my lovelies!"

Rather than stay in the middle like a living _coitus interruptus_ , Lisa actually scooted over to the far wall. Harry tried to be casual as Taylor pushed him into bed, and followed so that _he_ was in the middle, which he thought odd because he was like the opposite of _coitus interruptus._ He was more like _coitus-every-fucking-chance-he-got…us._

The lights went off, though, so he figured Lisa just wanted to be more secure.

He didn't complain when Taylor snuggled into him, her arm over his chest and her lips near his ear. "I want a ring," she whispered after a few moments of silence.

He shivered and turn to see her eyes gleaming in the moonlight shining through the blinds. "Let's go shopping tomorrow, then."

"Engagement now, marriage when I turn eighteen?"

"Whenever you want," he promised her. "I love you. I just want to be with you."

Her arm slid south and Harry's breath caught. _Sotto voce,_ he said, "I thought no super-happy-fun-time with company."

Her hand slipped under the bands of his pajamas. "We're changing the rules," Taylor said.

From the corner, Lisa spoke. "Think of it like a twelve-step program."

"I don't…I thought…I…oh, that's nice."

Lisa snickered. She reached up and pulled the blinds all the way closed as Taylor pulled down his pajama pants, and the night proceeded in a symphony of sighs and touching flesh.

* * *

A/N: Just to be clear, Lisa is _not actively participating._ Rather, she is trying to be a part of the family as best her power will allow.


	60. Acquisition 9

A/N: For the second day in a row, reviews surged well over 100. So, as promised, here's the next chapter. Since I will not be able to post on Christmas Day, I will check reviews tonight. If the reviews for this chapter are even close to 100, I'll post the Christmas Day chapter this evening. At this rate, I believe we'll have the entire story posted before New Years Day. Maybe sooner.

And with this chapter, all cards are on the table. Thank you all for reading and your reviews.

* * *

 **Acquisition 7.9**

Harry no longer spent his nights fused with memories of his past self. For all intents and purposes, those past memories had so thoroughly merged with his own that he didn't need to. Which meant that he could sleep peacefully when given opportunity. And when his sleep followed a bout of mind-blowing sex with the girl of his dreams, it was even better.

Strangely, though, for Harry the best part of their relationship wasn't the sex. Well, okay, it was. But the _second_ best part of their relationship was waking up next to Taylor. He did so that morning and found her on her stomach, entwined enticingly in their sheets but otherwise deliciously naked. He looked down at the rounded beauty of her right buttock, leg and thigh, and the slight smile to her lips as she slept, and felt like his heart would burst. He could feel his eyes get misty, but he didn't care. He _luxuriated_ in the simple joy of being with these incredible, beautiful…

Glancing up from Taylor's face, he saw Lisa staring right back at him. Her cheeks were flushed and her jaw hung open, and from her partially unbuttoned pajama top he could see the flush raced all the way down her neck. Her breath caught and her cheeks flushed even more, almost turning violet before she moaned slightly, fell back onto the bed, and simply stared at the ceiling while panting.

Taylor stirred a little, propping her head up to look at her friend. "Lisa, okay?"

Rather than answer, she covered her face with Teddy, brought her knees up, and physically shuddered as she moaned again.

Taylor turned back to Harry.

"I swear to God I didn't touch her."

"But you wanted to."

"Taylor, you're naked right in front of me. What I wanted to do was more of what we did last night. I was just…you know, looking at you. Then I saw she was awake, and she started…."

The moans buried in Thomas the Teddy slowly morphed into laughter. She turned away from them toward the wall, laughing so hard it sounded almost like she was about to cry. "Lisa, are you okay?"

"Oh, I'm just fucking marvelous," she said without facing them.

The funny thing was, she didn't sound sarcastic.

"What…what happened?"

"You wouldn't believe me."

"We're in bed with a reincarnated wizard, Lisa. Try me."

Lisa flopped back on to her back, and with her partially undone shirt Harry couldn't help but notice what it did to her…assets. Lisa didn't seem to care as she sat up to face them. Her face was still red, and she had little beads of sweat on her forehead. "Fine. I saw Harry looking at you. And it…fuck, it just gave me the first organism I've ever had. Happy?"

Harry considered this before grinning. "Damn, I'm good."

Lisa laughed and buried her hands in her face. Taylor, meanwhile, sat up opposite. She realized that she was completely butt naked. Glancing at her boyfriend's expression of almost religious adoration as he looked at her, she realized she was okay with it.

It was Lisa she was worried about. "He gave you an orgasm by looking at you?"

Lisa forced herself to sigh, sat up, and then blinked when she too saw Taylor was naked. She then realized Harry was too, before shaking her head. "I swore I'd run for the hills before I stayed in with you two. What am I doing here?"

"Getting off, sounds like," Harry pointed out.

"Lisa…?" Taylor asked.

"He was just…it's hard to explain. My power…my power told me everything. When he was looking at you, and then when he looked up at me, my power just…told me everything. About how it felt when you two made love, and…and how much he loves you and how much you love him back. Just like fanatical adoration-type love. And then he looked at me and…the same thing. And all at once my power told me what it would feel like to make love to him and…POW! Big O with a vengeance."

"So…us fucking last night right next to you did nothing for you, but looking at us after did?" Taylor asked.

Harry shrugged. "I kinda get it. I was just thinking about how…well, you know. Waking up next to you, Taylor? It's…it's everything. Even if we didn't have any more happy fun times, just waking up next to you makes all the shit we have to deal with worth it. Not to say we should stop with the happy fun times!" He added the last very quickly.

Taylor looked from him to Lisa. "And waking up next to both of us is twice as good?"

"Add in a monorail and it's be perfect," Harry agreed. He looked from her to Lisa and back. "What a second… pretend I'm an idiot. What's all this about? Lisa called it a twelve-step program last night."

"We're trying to work things out," Taylor admitted.

"We?" Harry looked back at the still flushed Lisa, who even as he stared grinned at him, then back to the beautiful and naked Taylor. "But…"

"You don't think she's hot?"

"It's not her tits I'm staring at," Harry pointed out.

Then Lisa had to undo a button, still grinning.

"Fuck," Harry muttered. Through Force of will alone, he looked back at Taylor. "I meant what I said last night."

"I know." She swallowed loud enough that he could hear it, and her own cheeks took on a blush. "I know you love me, Harry. I can see it every time you look at me. But I know you love her too. Thing is, so do I. Maybe not the way you're thinking, but I do. So…we're trying to work things out."

Harry's brain was working overtime, but unfortunately it was working while he was staring at his incredibly beautiful girl friend and…well, shit.

Lisa's grin grew wider. "I'll watch."

Harry and Taylor both turned and stared. "But…last night, you needed the lights off," Taylor noted.

"And this morning, I got an orgasm just from the way he looked at us. You guys…you're beautiful together. I can't…no touching for me. Not…not yet. But I can see it. You guys are so fucking beautiful together I'm about to start crying. So, I want you to do what you want to do, and I'll…be the perv for a change."

"Huzzah!" Harry said, a second before he tackled his naked girlfriend with a delighted laugh.

~~Simurgh's Son~~

~~Simurgh's Son~~

The first thing Harry noticed that was unusual, other than the fact that the whole world fucking rocked and that he was the greatest lover in the history of sexual reproduction in the whole fucking galaxy, was that Jess Haskins was cooking breakfast. This was only odd because she was standing up, whole and sound, while doing so.

The second thing he noticed was that Amy…no, Amelia…had joined them that morning at the table. And she was glancing at Jess as she cooked with a slightly glazed look in her eyes that Harry himself had that morning when he showered. With Taylor. While Lisa brushed her teeth. In the bathroom. With he and Taylor showering.

The third thing he noticed was that Sherrel and George were sitting next to each other. Sherrel had a wide, satisfied expression on her face, while George looked…a little confused, as if he had no idea what hit him. Canary and Qiana were both at the table with Tea and Bea in their laps respectively, feeding the girls the French toast sticks that they'd become addicted to during their brief drive across an alternate dimension America. And wasn't that a mouthful.

Stephanie sat between Aisha and Dinah, who were taking turns playing peek-a-boo with her baby.

It appeared, to Harry, as if nearly every adult in Coven got laid last night.

 _Damn, it was good to be in Coven._

He moseyed on over to Jess as she worked on a huge pan of eggs. He opened his mouth, and she said, "Don't say it."

"You look good," he said simply.

"You look like you got laid."

He grinned. "You too."

"Shut up and go sit down, it's almost ready."

He went and sit down. Jess brought the food to the table just as Taylor and then Lisa wandered in. He couldn't have stopped his grin if he had a gun to his head.

"Holy fuck, you didn't," Qiana said.

Stephanie looked up at the two and smiled while hiding her face behind her hand. Amelia, for her part, shook her head. "Really, you two? With him?"

Taylor blushed brilliantly. "Are we wearing fucking sign?"

The entire table turned and pointed at Harry, who threw his hands up in the air. "What? I didn't say anything!"

That's when Kurt, the new foreman of the BBDC, knocked on the door.

"Uh, hey, folks," he said, nervous at the odd, hormone-laden atmosphere in the room of super-powered teens. "Don't mean to interrupt or anything, but…uh…well, Eidolon's outside asking to speak to you."

"Oh, we'd better see to that!" Harry cried. He jumped to his feet and ran out.

~~Simurgh's Son~~

~~Simurgh's Son~~

When Harry stepped outside the main double doors of Coven Incorporated, he was surprised to see that the most powerful cape aside from Scion himself actually was floating in the air a few feet from their ward line.

He wore a thick green costume with an exaggerated musculature. A long, floating cape whipped around him in the morning breeze, terminating in a hood that had a soft, green-tined light that framed his masked face. The man's song sounded like an array of symphonies simultaneously imposed on each other, with odd moments of syncopation that made it sound like a musical mosaic. The power of it felt numbing.

"Hey, Eidolon. How are you?"

Lisa and Taylor stepped out behind him just in time to see Eidolon touch down softly to the ground on their ward line. He tilted his head as he studied them, almost like a dog. When he spoke, his voice did not have any of the modulation Harry would have expected. He sounded like a middle-aged man.

"You're just kids."

"While this is true," Harry said with the air of a BBC correspondent, "we are all very cool kids, because Coven is where all the cool kids come."

"Harry, I love you, but you need to stop talking," Lisa said urgently.

"Alexandria warned me what to expect, it's fine," Eidolon said with a dismissive waive of his gloved hand. "I would like to speak to you three in private. And before you ask, I promise you'll be safe."

"Amelia's clinic?" Taylor asked.

Harry nodded. The Wards would give them some protection if it turned out to be a trap. He placed both arms around their waists. Lisa closed her eyes and covered her ears, while Taylor pushed away her insects. A second later they stood in the empty lobby of Amelia's clinic. The lobby was tastefully decorated in art deco chairs and coffee tables.

Harry walked to the door and magically unsealed it just as Eidolon blinked from where he stood across the plaza to right in front of him. He nodded before stepping into the room. "So this is where Panacea intends to start healing?"

"Yep. Grand opening is next week, after we have the hotel finished," Harry said proudly.

Eidolon looked around the room with interest, stepping past Lisa and Taylor as he did so. He paused by a large print of one of Amy's favorite art pieces by Manet, which because it featured a nude was one Harry could appreciate.

"You have no idea how lucky you are that the Simurgh hasn't killed you yet," the hero finally said.

He said it casually, if talking about the weather. Harry, though, found his breath caught. He felt Taylor take right hand, while Lisa stepped to his other side.

"And you know something about that, don't you?" Lisa asked. "Alexandria said you were missing. Maybe a journey of discovery? What have you discovered, Eidolon?"

He turned to face them, and to Harry's utter shock the most powerful hero in the world removed his mask to reveal…a rather ugly, middle-aged man with a somewhat bulbous nose and heavy brows.

"I felt Leviathan die," he said, as if that explained everything.

Which, from the way Lisa blanched and covered her mouth, explained a lot more to her than it did to him.

"I need to sit down," she declared. She made her way to one of the groupings of low-back, colorful chairs and sank into it.

The unmasked Eidolon followed, sitting opposite. Harry and Taylor joined just to be with Lisa, until the four of them faced each other. Neither said anything for the longest time, prompting Harry to clear his throat.

"So, anyone want anything to eat, or drink? I know it's early."

"I wouldn't mind something," Eidolon said with a wry smile. "I actually haven't eaten in a day or so."

"Right-oh!"

Harry apparated, leaving the two girls he had just started to believe might _both_ be the loves of his life, back to the kitchen. Everyone was still there, talking heatedly.

"Harry, what's going on?" Paige demanded.

"Oh, well, you know, we're going to have tea and crumpets with Eidolon, nothing too bad," he said quickly. "Or…scrambled eggs and pancakes? Do we have any food left?"

He apparated right back to the clinic with a tray of scrambled eggs, bacon, pancakes, and a carafe of orange juice.

"That smells very good," Eidolon said.

Harry conjured plates and silverware. Since none of them had breakfast, they all ate casually, as if having Eidolon over was a normal occurrence. When they finished, Harry vanished all evidence of their meal and settled back. "So, for those of us who don't have a Thinker rating?"

Eidolon smirked, much like a dad would after a particularly foul dad joke, and glanced at Lisa. She paled a little, but forced one of her patented vulpine grins. (Harry had to look up what the hell a vulpine grin was after Taylor used the term, but now he knew for sure it fit).

"You're not a natural trigger," she said.

Eidolon crossed his legs and leaned back in his chair. "No, I wasn't."

"None of Triumvirate were."

"Nor Hero. All of us, in our previous lives, were dying or leading lives not worth leading. Alexandria had ovarian cancer. I was a paraplegic with advanced heart disease. Legend was dying of AIDS he obtained while donating blood. And Hero was suicidal after the death of his fiancé. We were four out of thousands of potentials."

"Oh my God," Lisa whispered, her vulpine grin turning somewhat sickly. "Case 53s?"

"Yes. Though those you're aware of were only some of the milder…cases. Some people died instantly, or were transformed into such grotesqueries that they could never be set loose. Nor were all of the people volunteers. Most were not even from this dimension."

"What does this have to do with Leviathan, or Simurgh?"

"Harry…Eidolon's power included controlling the Endbringers," Lisa said.

Harry frowned at her, then stared at Eidolon. "What?"

The famous hero didn't deny it. Instead, he leaned forward and propped his elbows on his knees. "Our resident Thinker believed I activated the Endbringers subconsciously as an attempt to prove my own strength against a more powerful foe. She believed I had a martyr complex and wanted a good death, rather than fading into obscurity as my powers weakened away with age."

Taylor's grip on Harry's hand grew tight enough to hurt. "We killed an Endbringer."

"And none of the others responded, nor will they," Eidolon said. "Because I felt Leviathan die. One of my Thinker powers told me exactly why, and what it meant. I'm afraid I didn't react well, otherwise we might have had this conversation sooner."

Harry didn't know if it was his magic, passive legillimancy or just intuition, but he suddenly glimpsed an older man with a tumbler of whiskey in one hand, and a .45 in his other, sitting on the porch of an old house in Texas.

He blinked the vision away, but saw Eidolon staring right at him with clear blue eyes.

"Yeah, I can imagine," he finally said.

"Can you?"

"I…one of my memories from my past life is committing suicide, and taking an entire castle of women and children with me. I…get it."

The hero didn't question Harry's memories at all. He merely nodded. "Our same Thinker cannot see you in her Path. All the ill that befell you—all of you—occurred because those of us who have dedicated our lives to saving humanity thought you were a threat to our plans. When the fate of every human on every iteration of earth faced extinction, no price seemed too high. Even the blood of a brother. We were wrong, though. When I found out what they did to Eric…"

Harry went very still when he saw a single tear run down the man's rugged, ill-formed face. His gaze met Harry's.

"The day he saved you in London, Bailey? That wasn't an exception—that was how Legend lived. He was the most selfless, loving person I'd ever known. After Hero died, he was our soul. He made me a better person, not just a hero. And those I trusted cut him out without a second thought, blindly following a path that didn't work anymore."

For the first time since they began speaking, Harry heard a deep, burning rage in the man's voice. "You didn't know."

"No."

"Would you have stopped it?"

That was Taylor asking, but only because Harry couldn't find his voice to do so.

"Before all this?" He leaned back with a tired, haggard sigh. "I'm not sure. Now? Yes, I would have."

"Because you've lost faith in them," Harry said.

"And in myself."

"Tell us everything," Lisa ordered.

Eidolon did, without hesitation.

~~Simurgh's Son~~

~~Simurgh's Son~~

That night, Harry found himself snuggled up between two incredibly beautiful women. One wore tight, skimpy panties and a sleeping shirt that exposed the most exhilarating legs in the world.

The other was buttoned up in full body silken pajamas. To his utter shock, he had no desire for any super-happy-fun-time with either of them. Instead, the growling nausea in his stomach kept him perfectly still between the two stars that served as his compass in life.

He could almost feel Lisa's brain going at hyperspeed. He had dittany leaves within easy reach because she'd already spiked several Thinker headaches. Taylor was silent and pensive, even as she held him so tight that without his runes he would have had a hard time breathing.

Eidolon's litany of sins rang in their ears still, as if he were still there speaking in his tired, monotone voice.

Worse yet was when, later that afternoon, Dinah confirmed everything he said, even if she did so using statistics and percentiles. It didn't change anything at all.

"So that's why you were reincarnated," Lisa finally said. Though she didn't hold Harry as closely as Taylor did, the fact that she lay on her side, facing him so close that he could actually feel her body against his, was astonishing. Other than brief hugs, he'd never seen her remain in such a state of prolonged contact with anyone.

"To kill Sc…him."

The fact that Scion could conceivably hear his name spoken anywhere in the world reminded Harry of his very earliest inherited memories. He'd once again run across a monster who could not be named.

"We have to assume that…he's at least as strong as a Q," Harry said, thinking aloud.

"Q?"

"Omnipotent, near omniscient and all but immortal gods formed from the Big Bang of Harry Potter's universe," he explained. "My…earlier self led Magekind in a war against them. We sort of won, but died in the process. Amanda…God...she's the last Q. She took me…I mean, Harry…to the end of the Universe. Potter was there when the Universe exploded and a new one formed. Because of what she was, Amanda became a part of the New Universe. She's literally God here, which means she can't strike directly. But she wouldn't have set me on this path if she didn't think I had a chance."

"So what do we do?" Taylor asked.

"We learn about our enemy," Lisa said. Harry went absolutely still when she leaned over and gently kissed his cheek. "But for now? We sleep."

She rolled away from them, cuddling her teddy.

Taylor hugged him close enough that he could bury his face in her hair and kiss her forehead. That's how they fell asleep.


	61. Interlude: Pulling Strings

A/N: I'm not going to have a chance to post on Christmas Day, but all of you came through with flying colors. So thank you, and please accept your Christmas present a little early. Like the others, if this chapter gets 100 reviews or more tomorrow, the next will be posted Wednesday, the day after Christmas.

I wish all of you a wonderful holiday tomorrow. Merry Christmas.

* * *

 **Interlude: Pulling Strings**

On the sixth year of her naming, Fortuna woke from her waking life, and entered a living dream.

It was a terrifying dream at first, and heart-breaking as well. She dreamed that the people that she'd known, in the small fishing village that was the old world she'd known, turned into terrible monsters.

She dreamed that a great monster swept over the world, leaving seeds of small evil in its wake that settled into her people. Many turned into monsters themselves—murdering, destroying monsters with sorcerous powers that could not be explained.

But within her dream, like so many dreams of children, she had a marvelous power that could not only tell her how to achieve her goals, but somehow could even make her move her body just enough to do whatever the power told her she had to do. She was too young to understand that the power was a set of strings, and she nothing more than a puppet even as she pretended to be the puppeteer.

With her power, though, came a dream of a terrible, dark god. Within the realms of her living dream, she knew that the great beast that swept over their village and killed her parents, her siblings and her cousins was going to make a war that would spread across an entire world. Even as she realized the truth, her mind struggled with just what that meant. She parsed it down to a simple truth.

If she didn't do something, then other little girls would have to watch their families die just like she did.

Within the dream, the strings pulled and she knew what to do.

She ran from the last of her family, an uncle with a bad leg whom she told to flee. She ran into the hills where the wolves preyed, and then up the mountains that her people had worshipped for ages.

Even within the dream, her body ached. She thought that odd, that her muscles would hurt when it was her power telling her where and how to move. The power guided her so that the branches wouldn't rip the little woolen dress her mother made for her; so that she avoided the lichen which would break away and make her foot slide on the rock beneath.

Little Forta's power guided her up the rock wall that held generations of pictures showing the history of her people. The power guided her past the corpses, many of which had horns or terrible features, as if their bodies were made of clay and a giant set of hands had distorted and ruined the shapes.

She knew, even at six, that the monstrous godling who fell on the mountain had a plan, a vision of the future where it would make the world burn and die. But something went wrong, and Forta's entire village died as a result.

The mountain she reached was not the same place her people climbed up every summer to give thanks to the god that lived inside. She saw a different sky that revealed an early morning, when it was late afternoon on the cliffside.

But writhing in between the spaces around the mountain was the evil godling who killed her family.

Now that she arrived, she wasn't sure what to do.

" _You have to kill it,_ " her mother whispered in her mind. Only, even in the dream, she knew it was not her mother. It was the god of the mountain, speaking in a woman's voice. And with that whisper came the certainty. And with the certainty, the strings of her power pulled and the plan formed in her mind. A haze of fog hung over her mind's eye, and she knew that the monstrous godling was trying to blind the path.

The strings pulled her hand to the little knife at her belt. All the children over five had a knife—the day her mother gave it to her to help with the food was the proudest day of her life. The two-inch long blade was made of worked metal—an expense only a few of the village children would ever have. It was the most valuable thing she'd ever owned.

The strings pulled; the knife slid from the leather scabbard her father made for her and she started she started walking forward.

Confused, frightened people in strange clothes, with strange skin and hair, meandered about the monster. They were not from the village, nor any village on Forta's word. Her power told her they were strangers, as scared as she was when she watched her father turn into a monster and kill her mother.

When the godling fell, it tore apart reality itself, leaving holes that these strangers wandered through by accident.

The strings pulled; the dream continued; she walked forward, knife in hand. She did not get far before one of the aliens stepped in her way. She was dressed like one of the slatterns her mother used to curse in the city down the coast. Her dress was of a fine weave, but revealed some of her breasts and her calves in a way no decent woman would ever permit. Her skin was black like oil, and her hair wrapped in thin braids that glistened under an alien morning sky.

The slatternly woman made strange words.

The strings pulled. Fortuna moved past the woman with little effort. The monstrous godling carved out a massive canyon when it fell, settling in a crater at its end. It filled every part of the scarred earth in a pool of false flesh, reaching into many worlds at once.

She made her way down into the crater, slipping and sliding with a control only her strings could provide. The ease of it is why she knew she was dreaming. For how could a child surf down the scree of a hill like even the most athletic boys in her village could not?

The alien woman with black skin and immoral dress followed, moving slower. She used her hands and feet to control her descent, sliding from rock to rock, stopping before sliding down further. She hadn't even reached a fourth of the way down when Fortuna reached the bottom.

The strings pulled; Fortuna walked with a confidence she did not feel into the nightmare of living flesh by herself. All around she saw the false flesh—hands moving, webs of skin stretching and folding. Her ears rang with a noise worse than even the great nor'easters that blew in during the dark months.

But under the greater symphony, she heard soft noises that were even worse-heartbeats, a choir of soft breaths and whispers. The monstrous godling struggled to form a mask to better lie and manipulate the people it intended to destroy.

Fortuna walked further into the forest of false flesh. She did not like this dream—this nightmare. The strings pulled, and despite her terror her feet carried her forward.

Everything stopped. She found herself facing the false being itself. She stood with her precious knife in her hand as she faced a mostly human shape struggling to finish itself from the false flesh around it.

The strings pulled; she gained leverage by standing on a raised hand that pushed up out of the great, flash ground, until she stood eye-to-eye with the monstrous being.

The godling recognized her. It knew she was a threat. It lurched toward her, growing and filling in even as it came toward her. The godling's false face lifted; false eyes opened and _saw_ her.

The strings pulled; she raised her arm, knife held with the point down.

The nightmare darkened; the strings were frozen and a cloud of nothingness wiped the path from her mind. Where before she saw a narrow path now was nothing, a blind future she could no longer see.

In their short war, the monstrous godling struck her first. It smiled at her, a hollow, false smile on its false face. The expression looked wrong, but the intent was clear. The godling smiled because the godling believed it had already won.

The short interlude ended with a human voice intruded into the nightmare's ending. The black-skinned woman in the slatternly dress had caught up to her, shouting in her alien tongue.

Fortuna asked and the strings pulled. Sounds came to her that she did not understand; but she knew the meaning anyway. Two words: 'Stab it.'

More words came; alien sounds whose meanings flittered through her mind because of the strings that pulled her along. "I- I can't."

The woman placed her hand around Fortuna's shoulders; the woman's body pressed against her back almost as if she were Fortuna's mother, hugging her and giving her a bulwark to stand against.

"I- I have seen visions," the alien words flowed. "Things I was not meant to see, things this… godling wanted to keep to itself. I… have to stop it."

Words or not, she was frozen by indecision; the fog that froze her strings whenever she tried to move against the smiling godling. The woman leaned forward over Fortuna's shoulder, her face in Fortuna's peripheral vision. She said something.

"I believe you."

The godling pushed at them, still only half-formed. More alien words came. Necessity. Fear. And the woman believed. She took Fortuna's most precious treasure and stabbed the false flesh in the neck.

The godling writhed. Thousands of limbs of false flesh waived like limbs in a nor'easter. Thousands of ears, eyes, faces and noses twitched violently. The constant, organic noise around them slowly faded, the multitudinous heartbeats going still, the breathing quieting, until finally the movements all around them stopped.

The godling's false body hung in mid-air in front of where she and the black woman fell. She could see it trying to form itself, only to fail. It drew breaths with false lungs in real pain. It wasn't dead, but it wasn't alive. A connection had been severed in a moment where the godling was most vulnerable.

"Again? The heart?"

Fortuna shook her head. She knew the Godling was dead; the strings no longer pulled.

"Can you explain this? Do you know something?" The woman's words already made more sense to her.

She nodded, no strings attached.

"Please," the woman begged. "My life just turned upside down. I've been lost here for three days."

As if waking from the dream, Fortuna's eyes began to water as it finally sank into her soul that her mother and father were dead; that her village was gone and her people slaughtered. She had nowhere to go. No family to care for her.

"I need food," Fortuna said in the alien words, which now fell easily from her tongue. "I have no home to go to, so I need shelter." She met the confused woman's eyes. "I will take you back to your home."

The woman nodded. "Yes, of course. And you'll explain?"

"Yes. But there's one more thing. I need help."

"Help?"

"There is one more of these things somewhere out there." This Fortuna knew. But she couldn't see it, not directly. All she could see was the fog.

~~Simurgh's Son~~

~~Simurgh's Son~~

When she dreamed, Fortuna talked to the God in the Mountain.

In her waking life, she was now Contessa. She had killed people with her hands; she had blood on her fingers. She could not be her parent's daughter any more; only Fortuna remained. Fortuna could not have worked with the woman, who now called herself Doctor, to feed pieces of the monstrous godling to people in the hopes they could help fight the second beast.

For every one who gained powers, five suffered beyond measure.

No, when the strings pulled she was Contessa.

In her dreams, though, she remained Fortuna. This dream within a dream carried no strings. She moved by her own will; she dreamed of what she desired. She dreampt of her village, of growing up and wedding Dolan, the boy her parents favored as her husband. Of having children of her own and raising them as she was raised; as her mother was raised. And every solstice that would climb the face of the mountain and make sacrifices at the alter on top in thanks to the god in the mountain who watched over them.

Until a more powerful god came along and destroyed them all.

Like her family and her village, she now could only see the god of her people in her dreams. She saw on the edge of the mountain near the old stone alter even now, watching the ocean in the distance. In her dreams, she could hear her family singing their thanks for another year of life. She could not see them, and the music seemed distant and indistinct. The older she got, the harder it was to remember even in her dreams.

The god sat beside her. Though her body was made of the same granite as the mountain that held her, she looked like a beautiful young woman, and sounded the same.

"Today we turned a young woman with cancer into the most powerful flying parahuman we've ever seen," Fortuna said.

"How many died in her group?"

"Three." The numbers barely held meaning for her, even in her dreams. She'd long ago stopped trying to path the demise of the other godling, whom people of this world called Scion.

"Path to happiness," she whispered as she stared out over an ocean she'd not seen in years. In her dreams, there were no strings. Even if there were, in her dreams, as in her life, she could find no path to lasting happiness. Only a path to victory. It surprised her to find the two were not the same.

"I know a path," the god of the mountain said.

"To what?"

The god smiled and nodded behind them; to the singing families whose faces Fortuna could no longer remember.

"I don't understand."

"I know."

The god held out her hand, and in it was a smooth pebble. "This little stone could cause an avalanche that could sweep away your fears and problems. It just needs to find the right hands."

"What is it?"

"It's a tiny shard of an ancient heart. From before this world was born; before the sun shone. It is hope."

"Hope for what?"

The god in the mountain smiled at her. "For all of you."

~~Simurgh's Son~~

~~Simurgh's Son~~

She rarely thought of her age. The people of Doctor's world did not account age the way her people did. Her people did not count a child as alive until after ten days, because so often they did not live so long.

Even so, by the reckoning of her new world, Contessa was twenty-four years old when the strings pulled her into the park. Families laid out blankets for picnics, taking advantage of a rare sunny day in April. The air felt brisk and refreshing, and the families enjoying their Sunday fought hard not to think of the two monsters that were ravaging the world.

The little boy was crying; another little boy had pushed him off the swings and then hit him when he tried to get back on. The fight went as expected for a little boy of five against a boy of eight.

The boy's parents were nearby; of course they would be. The father was a handsome man, laid out and sound asleep in the afternoon sun. The mother, a flaming-haired beauty, called out "Harry, baby, are you okay?"

Little Harry seemed to vacillate between wanting to keep playing, and seeking comfort from his mother.

"Okay, mama," he called back. He wiped away his tears and decided play was more important.

The strings pulled, and Contessa followed until she found herself sitting on another set of swings on the opposite side of the playground. The boy walked right up to the other free swing, pulled himself up by grabbing the chains, and then stared down at the bloody rent in his pants.

"Oh," he said in dismay.

"Are you hurt?" Contessa asked, because that's what her power told her to say.

"Nah, 's okay." The red-rimmed eyes hinted otherwise, but her power told her not to speak about it. Instead, she swung. If she had done so of her own choice, she might have enjoyed it. She'd never seen such things when she was little, not until Doctor made her go to school.

The boy tried to swing, but it was hard for him to get started with his hurt knee.

"Would you like me to help push you?"

"Daddy says I can't talk t' strangers."

"Well, my name is Fortuna. And your name is Harry."

He blinked at her. "How you know dat?"

"Your mother told me. So now we're not strangers, right?"

"Oh, s'alright then, guess."

She left her swing and gave him a push. That was all he needed to get moving until he had a fiercely high swing, almost level with the center bar above. At the nadir of his swing, he let go with a wild _whoop_ and flew feet first into a pile of leaves. He did so with a practiced ease that spoke of long experience.

Except this time, his knee was hurt.

He came limping out, tear-eyed. "Hurt," he said by way of explanation.

"I know something that might help," she told him. "Come sit, I'll show you."

He did as instructed, trying not to cry. His landing had made his bloody knee worse, she saw, as well as tore his pants more.

Contessa removed the stone from her dream. She didn't understand why it was real, nor how it came to be in her hand when she woke from her dream with the god of the mountain. But regardless of how, she had it, and when she asked her power what to do with it, she found herself pulled to London, to this park, at this moment.

She slipped the small pebble from her pocket.

"This is a magic stone," she said soberly. "I don't know if the magic will work or not, but it won't hurt to try, right?"

He nodded, eyes-wide. Magic was real, he knew, because Legend and Alexandria could fly.

She placed the stone on the flat of his bent knee, just above the rent. Even she was surprised when it seemed to flatten out and widen into a golden disk filled with strange writing and symbols, and a large amythest in the middle.

"Pretty," Harry whispered.

It then sank into his leg, completely out of sight. The bloody gash on his knee disappeared, as did the rent in his pants. The boy leaned forward and fell off the wing. The string pulled and Contessa caught him before placing him gently down on the padded surface of the play area.

"Who're you?" he asked when he woke. "Where's mama?"

"She's coming, sweetie," Contessa said. "You just stay put."

"'kay."

Contessa stood and walked away; she could hear Lily Bailey behind her, calling to make sure her young son was okay.

~~Simurgh's Son~~

~~Simurgh's Son~~

"Then why the fuck did you break the fucking truce!?"

The small conference room in Cauldron's primary facility could only be reached by the Doormaker. It was the securest facility in existence. It was one of the few places Contessa felt relatively safe.

Facing the blazing rage of one of the most peaceful men she'd ever met left that security shaken. The strings pulled; she did not show how much it bothered her to see how angry Legend was.

"It was necessary." The words were not hers; her power spoke for her.

"Why?" Legend demanded, standing now in his righteous fury. "For whom? To accomplish What?"

The strings fell silent as heavy fog locked them tight. "I don't know," Contessa admitted. "I can't see him. The Path told me it had to be done."

Legend leaned over the table, little sparks of energy dancing across his fingers. "Then maybe, just maybe, it really is magic? Regardless, I'm not sure what it is we wish to accomplish by detaining him. Why am I here?"

Doctor and Alexandria began their spiel. Legend rejected it angrily, dismissing each of their arguments. All those at the table knew that Legend was their weak link not because of his power, but because of his ethics and morals. The fact that he still had any made him an unstable variable in their discussion.

As he, Doctor and Alexandria argued, the strings pulled and a path opened up. She didn't understand it; she didn't ask for a particular path to make sure that Mage and Skitter both suffered. Not the path that ensured they would overcome their suffering in each other's arms.

 _Path to happiness._

But to get them to their happiness, there would be suffering, pain and death. And the realization that she was going to have to kill the man who even now fought so righteously for Harry Bailey left her broken inside.

 _What have I become?_

~~Simurgh's Son~~

~~Simurgh's Son~~

David Winthrop sat on the back porch of his family's ranch with a Cold .45 revolver in one hand, and a bottle of Jack Daniels in the other. The bottle held only four shots left; the gun held one bullet.

He lifted the gun when she stepped around the corner of his house, pointing it right at her. "What the fuck are you doing here?" he snarled.

He did not sound drunk.

Contessa continued walking until she sat next to him. She took her fedora off and held it in her hands. It was a gift from Doctor, when she turned twenty-five. It fit perfectly, and though her power didn't care, she personally thought the hat made her look rather dashing.

"Cauldron is broken," she said.

"No shit, you fucking murdered Legend. Worse yet, you don't even know why, do you?"

"I…" She bowed her head. "I can guess."

"Go on, then. Guess why we had to murder my best friend?"

"Because Mage and Skitter _had_ to go to the Birdcage."

"They escaped!" David screamed. "What was the point in sending them there when they just turned around and escaped!"

"So that they would understand how much they loved each other."

David pushed himself off the porch of his house, spun around, and put the barrel of the gun to her forehead. She didn't try to stop him. "You telling me you fucking killed Legend so a couple of fucking teens could get laid in prison?"

"Harry Bailey and Taylor Hebert will kill the monster," Contessa said. She didn't know if it was her power, her faith, or the god of the mountain speaking. "But only if they are united. Only if they know, without any doubt, how much they love each other. And the only way they could truly know that was at their worse, lowest points. They had to reach rock bottom before they could climb the mountain."

She met his gaze squarely over the barrel. "Just like you had to reach rock bottom before you could climb your own mountain. You understand, now. You have a role to play, Eidolon. It's time for you to play it. Your sabbatical is over. Coven is going to need you. It's time to get to work."


	62. Conquest 1

A/N: I hope everyone who celebrates it had a wonderful Christmas. As I promised leading into the holiday, for any chapter that receives a 100 or more signed reviews, I will post the next chapter that next day. While the Christmas day chapter arrived late Christmas eve, so far you've blown me away with your responses. So,onward and upward.

There was a time-skip with this chapter. And there will be another with the next as we go into the final chapters of this story. Thank you all for reading and your support.

* * *

 **Conquest 8.1**

Harry beamed as he held Taylor's hand and led her, Lisa, the Mayor of Brockton Bay and Danny Hebert through a small forest that separated the Coven Campus from the docks, where another transport was unloading FEMA supplies for the city, and in turn would load up several metric tons of recyclables from the downtown area where Sherrel was currently running her rig.

Taylor looked embarrassed, with a red tint to her cheeks. Lisa wore her most vulpine grin, while she continuously glanced at a suspicious Danny. He in turn kept looking at the large diamond ring that adorned his daughter's left ring finger.

"Just astonishing," Mayor Christner said. The mayor seemed oblivious to the by-play. "Just…why, when this forest popped up my police chief actually sent me a memo warning me that Blasto had come to town!"

"Er, no," Harry said. "If Blasto comes to town, we may have to hurt him."

"He put a bomb in my head," Lisa said, no longer grinning. "He won't survive if he comes."

"I see," Christner said, managing to sound rather neutral. "Then how did you get all these trees to grow overnight? This is decade's worth of growth."

"Harry," Taylor growled, her cheeks flaring.

Harry beamed. "Magic."

Lisa's grin began to look painful and Danny's frown intensified. Taylor blushed and remained uncharacteristically quiet even as she continued to cling tightly to Harry's hand.

"Anyway," Harry continued. "We were thinking about a string of parkland, only lightly developed. You know—sidewalks and maybe the occasional water fountain. We'll probably eventually build housing for Coven outside our headquarters so we can convert that to office space, and Taylor and I need to build at least one more botanical garden—maybe two. The second could be open to the public."

"That would be nice," Taylor said, eager to talk about anything but where the trees came from. "We could set up some beehives for honey production."

Harry nodded. "The honey your bees make is the best." He continued to the Mayor. "Then, after the condos for our workers and the school staff, we were thinking about rebuilding the Boardwalk and maybe invite in an amusement park company. I mean, nothing groundbreaking or anything, maybe just a roller coaster, Ferris wheel and stuff like that. You know, for the families staying over for Panacea's clinic."

"It's all in the zoning applications I sent over yesterday, Mr. Mayor," Danny said quickly.

"Yes, yes, I'm sure it'll be approved. But Mr. Bailey, Miss Hebert, please understand that the city can't afford any more tax abatements."

"Oh, I wouldn't ask for one for the amusement park," Harry said. "I was thinking we go in joint, maybe make part of it the City's Parks and Recreation Department."

Christner frowned intently. "We don't…" If nothing else, the politician caught on quickly. "Which would make us eligible for state grants. I'm really impressed, Mr. Bailey."

Harry shrugged. "I'll take full credit for it all, even though it was Mr. Hebert's idea."

"How generous of you," Taylor muttered.

"I'd still like to know how you got this forest to grow overnight."

"Well, first I traced out a series of concentric circles in the area we wanted to fertilize," Harry explained. "We threw all sorts of native seeds and nuts all over the ground and watered them, and then Taylor and I went to the center of the runic circle and performed a..."

Taylor covered his mouth. "If you say another word, you will never perform another rite again," she hissed.

Lisa began laughing at the expression of horror on Danny Hebert's face, and the red flush of embarrassment on the Mayor's as he began to understand.

"Taylor, it's not like your dad doesn't know you sleep with your fiancé. You're both seventeen now, you're been engaged for a year, and you use protection. So the fact that you can use sex and Harry's bullshit power to grow a forest overnight isn't that big a deal."

Lisa delivered everything with an off-hand nonchalance that left both Harry and Taylor staring at her with a gaping mouth.

" _Et tu,_ Lisa?" Taylor whispered.

"Next time, don't try hiding my teddy bear," came the equally nonchalant response. "Especially not with Harry's magic."

"I feel that we've gone a little far-afield," the Mayor said.

"We left that field years ago," Danny muttered, while glaring at all three of the teens now.

"Oh no, we're right in the middle of the field," Lisa said, grinning. "In fact, that spot right there was where…"

Harry and Taylor both slapped their hands over her grinning mouth.

"So, did Dinah tell you about starting summer school at the new Coven Garden's Middle School?" Harry asked quickly.

It was at that moment that Armsmaster stomped loudly through the trees, halberd in hand. He stopped when he saw Harry and Taylor covering Lisa's mouth, all three unmasked and out of costume, standing next to the Mayor and the CEO of the fastest growing employer in the still recovering city.

"Am I interrupting anything?" Armsmaster said.

"No!" Harry said.

"We're done here," Taylor said almost the second Harry finished his exclamation, as if they both spoke in the same breath.

The mayor chuckled. "I suppose we are. Danny, I'll let the zoning commission know this is highest priority. What Coven has already done for the city's recovery is nothing short of miraculous, you've certainly earned some special consideration. Walk with me?"

Danny sent a patented Dad-Glare toward Harry. It was similar to Taylor's Death-Glare of Rage, only not quite as deadly. Still very effective to a future son in law. The two civilians turned and walked away through the trees, heading a little further south where the Mayor's car was waiting in the Coven plaza.

Armsmaster cleared his throat. "For future reference, Mage and Skitter, you may wish to check the status of any surveillance equipment before engaging such extreme examples of public affection as what you engaged in last night."

"You're joking," Harry declared.

"No, he's not," Lisa said. "Which begs the question of why your little ritual hasn't been plastered across every computer screen in the country."

"Dragon stopped the signal and deactivated the camera once she realized that your activities were not entirely…recreational," Armsmaster said.

"Oh my God, just shoot me now," Taylor muttered.

"So, you're not here to take pointers, are you?" Harry asked.

He grinned at his fiancé. _There_ was her patented Death-Glare of Rage.

"As stimulating a discussion as that might be," Armsmaster said without any inflection at all. "I'll have to pass. I'm here to…engage the services of Coven."

"I do believe hell has just frozen over," Lisa said.

"No, that happens when we agree," Harry said. "Still, we're trying to be good guys, right? So, let's talk, Armsy. What's bothering you, besides a soul-crushing absence of humor or personality?"

Armsmaster sighed. "Despite all evidence to the contrary, Dragon believes that Coven might be able to save her life."

~~Simurgh's Son~~

~~Simurgh's Son~~

"Dragon is a robot," Taylor said. Harry could tell she was still wrapping her mind around the concept.

On his opposite side, Lisa actually looked horrified. "And you want us to actually…what? Unleash Skynet on the world? We're talking about the Tinker who built and runs the Birdcage. You know, that fucking hell hole you sent us, that's filled with kids and innocent people? You want us to unleash that on the world without any type of… Of course you do, you're in love with her. Really? You're so emotionally and socially stunted that the only person you're capable of affection for is artificial?"

The trees around them hummed with insect life, but Taylor ensured no one was within easy listening distance. Armsmaster stood in his sleep blue power armor, his mouth set in a grim line while his beard bristled in a manly fashion that Harry felt no jealously about at all, given his inability to grow a beard.

"Dragon has no choice but to comply with all lawful orders," he said.

"Oh, so she's just programmed that way," Lisa snorted.

"Precisely."

"And what if someone gets in and programs her to take over the world economy, or tank it?" Lisa snarled, genuinely angry. "What if someone programs her to launch all the remaining ICBMs in the world? Or, just because she's a machine and logically concludes that humans are a mistake, she does that anyway the moment we unleash her? Armsmaster, we're talking about a machine! An artificial sentience! She's the very definition of an S-Class threat."

Harry cleared his throat. "I don't get what the big deal is. Let's just pop her into a positronic brain and boom, she's alive and well and can't replicate or propagate herself."

The silence that followed made Harry look at the three others worriedly.

"What?" All three of them said the word at once.

"I thought you said you were magic," Taylor said. "What would you know about positronic brains? Besides what Asimov said."

Harry blinked at her. "Who's Asimov? I'm talking about Data. He's this really cool android my other self ran into in the future…er, past? Anyway, android, positronic brain. He could even have sex, believe it or not. Even managed an upgrade that gave him emotional responses and everything. Very smart guy."

"Could you build one of these positronic brains?" Armsmaster asked.

Harry snorted. "What do I look like, an engineer? Now, if you needed me to program a rune stone to make a golem, I could. But a positronic brain? Couldn't do it. But I bet you could. I'd just need a way to get the plans to you."

"So, you couldn't build it, but somehow you have the plans in your head?" Lisa ran a hand through her pixie-cut blonde hair. "Harry, even for you, that makes no sense."

"I understand magic," Harry said. "I understand technology that makes use of magic. I know the formulas to go faster than light. But a positronic brain was, even for its time, centuries ahead of the competition, and even hundreds of thousands of years into the future it remains the standard mechanism for autonomous artificial intelligences. What I carry in my brain is a lecture that Data gave when he was Lucasian Chair of Mathematics at Cambridge. I just need to get those memories to you."

"How do you propose to do so?" Armsmaster said.

"I was thinking magical telepathy, myself," Harry said. "But it would require two things—first I'd need to see your face because it requires eye-contact, and two—the PRT would need to release Vista and allow her to join Coven."

"Vista is a fourteen-year-old orphan and ward of the state," Armsmaster said.

"Whom you have imprisoned because of her repeated attempts to join us," Lisa pointed out. "Of course, there's a simple solution to it."

"You are not old enough to adopt," Armsmaster said.

Harry would have liked to say the man sounded angry, but he spoke just above a monotone. He found it funny that the robot lady sounded more human than her human boyfriend.

"Like I want kids," Lisa snorted. "No, Armsy, I'm talking about the Mayor of Brockton Bay. He's legally taken custody of Dinah Alcott but appointed us as her primary caregivers. He could do the same for Dinah's best friend. Or Taylor's dad, for that matter. Or any number of adults currently working for Coven. You do realize we built and own the private school she's going to right now, right? Just let one of the adults in Coven adopt her. That way you won't have to hold a fourteen-year-old against her will, and you get whatever bullshit information Harry's carrying about robot heads."

"And…there's one more thing," Harry said.

"Oh?"

"A favor," Harry said. "Nothing illegal, or even unethical. Rather…a political favor. Coven is going to be approaching the Protectorate within the next few months, and when we do, I'd like your political support."

"I will not violate any laws," Armsmaster said.

"You wouldn't have to," Harry assured him. "Hell, I'd bet you'd support it anyway, but I'd still sleep better knowing you'd support us. So, do we have a deal? I can provide you every piece of information I have from hundreds of thousands of years of technological innovation about androids, including some pretty detailed holographic blue prints I saw, in return for a political favor and Missy getting adopted by a member or employee of Coven or one of its subsidiary companies."

"When would this occur?"

Harry looked to Taylor, who nodded. "As soon as Vista is free and by our side," Taylor said.

~~Simurgh's Son~~

~~Simurgh's Son~~

For a woman who could build an entire city in a day with her power, Agnes Court looked somewhat unimpressive. Petite was a good word, Harry decided. She reminded him of the head librarian at Leicester College back in the day, all prim and proper with an ankle-length gray woolen skirt, white top and matching gray jacket. She even wore black-rimmed glasses.

For all her old-woman sense of style, she looked to be in her mid-twenties. She was—if the file Harry read from their Protectorate contacts—one of the most powerful shakers in the world. At the moment she was sipping hot tea with her pinky daintily out.

"I'm not sure I understand why Coven felt it had to intrude in these discussions," she said gently. "My organization is not interested in playing the cops and robbers game. Rather, we've come to Brockton Bay to discuss some very lucrative business opportunities with individuals we thought were rogues. I assure you our offers are legitimate and perfectly legal."

"Of course," Lisa said. In a game of wits, Harry was more than happy to let their Thinker-8 lead the discussion, with Taylor backing her up. "After all, our organizations did work well together to get the NEPEA-5 anti-parahuman commerce bill repealed."

Court nodded regally and sipped her tea. "So, is there a reason you asked to meet?"

"Parian approached us regarding her concerns," Taylor said. "She read about what happened to the three rogues in Louisiana who politely declined your generous offer, only to suffer at the hands of Bastard Son a month later."

"Yes, that was a dreadful coincidence," Court said. "But that is neither here nor there. There is no threat implicit in my offers to young Parian, or your remarkable Panacea. After all, she is not a member of your organization either."

"Actually, that is no longer the case," Lisa said. Harry noticed how hard it was for her to keep from grinning ear-to-ear. "Given her many business and emotional ties with Coven, Panacea has formally joined us. And Parian has requested membership as well. I understand Harry already has a design for her shop on the Boardwalk."

"A shame," Agnes said in a flat tone. "We could have done so much for them both. Still, it wasn't a complete loss."

"Yeah, you're welcome to Othala," Taylor said. "Our…philosophical differences with the surviving Empire capes are significant enough that such a relationship just won't work. I'm sure when Rune finishes her sentence, she'd be interested in the Elite as well. Meanwhile, there's one last thing we would like to share with you."

"Oh?" Court managed to quirk on perfectly plucked dark brow.

Harry dutifully handed the warrant to Taylor, who handed it to Lisa, who placed it on the table in the Boardwalk Café where they met with one of the high-ranking members of the Elite.

The cape put her tea down and stared intently at the warrant before looking up at the three teenagers. "Surely this is a jest."

"We know people in high places," Harry said.

"They don't appreciate how elected officials tend to die or reverse positions when the Elite move in," Taylor added.

"So no, that's not a joke," Lisa finished. "That is a fully executed and signed Kill Order for Bastard Son. According to Dragon, he was last sighted in Oakland, California. While Alexandria no longer heads her local protectorate team, she sometimes accepts Kill Orders as a way to stay busy. She…oh, hold on."

She made a show of looking at her phone. "And…that did it. Bastard Son and his entire cell are gone."

"You should be too," Taylor said, slipping easily into her death-glare of rage. "Brockton Bay is ours. The Teeth couldn't take it, the Empire couldn't keep it, Accord tried and failed, we wiped the Fallen out entirely when they moved in. We don't start fights, Agnes, but we always finish them. Stay out of New Hampshire. Stay off the East Coast. Hopefully we won't meet again."

Agnes Court didn't shout or scream or break down in any way. Instead, she said, "Very well, dears. I do hope you haven't made a mistake."

Harry shrugged. "If we did, we'll survive it. Trust me, the Elite wouldn't."

Without another word, she turned and left. Harry leaned back, basking in the glory of how awesome his girls were. He then cleared his throat. "So, it's occurred to me that we've adopted another lesbian couple. When are we getting our monorail?"

"Damn it, Harry!" Taylor grumped. She pulled out a twenty and handed it to Lisa.

"I told you he couldn't resist. Listen to the Thinker, Taylor. We're always right, even if we're not."

"That doesn't make sense," Harry pointed out.

"Sure it does, you're just not smart enough to understand it," Lisa said.

"You know what I am smart enough to understand?"

Lisa's eyes bulged. "Don't you…we're in fucking public!"

"We do owe her," Taylor noted as she slowly inched out of her seat. Around them, the other patrons of the café got a little nervous. After all, the three of them were not just famous for being capes, but for single-handedly reviving the economy of the city.

"Don't you dare. You want video from the second forest made public? I swear I…oh shit!"

Taylor lunched from her seat. As fast as Lisa was, and as observant as her power made her, Taylor was taller, stronger and faster.

And Harry knew just where to tickle.

~~Simurgh's Son~~

~~Simurgh's Son~~

"You're looking good, Hannah."

Chevalier smiled appreciatively at the two spots of color that formed just above the line of Miss Militia's bandana mask. Approaching thirty, the young girl he'd been infatuated with as a Ward had filled out into a strikingly beautiful woman. Her combat slacks were just tight enough to hug her hips, and her camo top did nothing to hide the fact she was very healthy.

He'd gone through enough management training to know that he should not be looking at a subordinate the way he looked at Miss Militia, but Chevalier could not help it. She'd been too large a part of his maturity into manhood for him to ever look at her with anything other than affection.

He was grateful that her voice sounded warm, and that he could see the faint crow's feet at her eyes wrinkle with her smile, even if the smile itself was hidden by her mask. "You too, Paul. How are you fitting in at New York?"

The brief surge of warmth at seeing his first girlfriend faded back into the cool melancholy whenever he thought about work.

"It's been tough. PNHQ is a mess. Legend was everyone's dad, and Prism was everyone's snappy older sister. The loss of those two has left every one staggering. Not to mention Alexandria's resignation. At least Eidolon showed up again in Houston. Still not sure why they picked me to replace Legend."

"Because you were the most like him," Hannah said, as if that explained everything. She offered him a hand. "Come on, the others are waiting."

He followed her off the helicopter pad atop the Protectorate Rig in Brockton Bay. As they walked, he glanced down to the south at the growing spot of lush, developed land that seemed to be growing almost like a living organism in the middle of Leviathan's devastation.

Armsmaster was already there with the entire Brockton Bay Protectorate and Wards team, only a few of whom Chevalier knew on sight. He did recognize Dragon, who evidently went to Mage to deal with her famously crippling agoraphobia. For such a famous cape, she looked unusual only in how utterly normal she appeared. Average build and height. Her head was covered by a full shaded helmet of blue steel similar to Armsmaster, but otherwise she did not look like the most powerful Tinker in the world.

Other than the noticeable absence of Eidolon and Alexandria, all the Protectorate leaders were there. Odder than that was how they deferred to Chevalier himself, as if his position suddenly made him know what the hell he was doing.

They all loaded up in their caravan of PRT transports—the most powerful team of heroes in the country—and started the drive through downtown Brockton Bay. He noticed a massive, ugly junkpile on wheels that seemed to literally be eating the piles of debris from the various collapsed buildings, leaving clean soil in its wake. He chose not to comment on it.

Instead, he turned to look forward through the front windows of his transport. Coven Gardens was celebrating its grand opening, and the entirety of the Protectorate was invited.

When they arrived, the transports formed up around a lush fountain in the center of Coven Plaza. On one side of the plaza Chevalier saw four large warehouse style buildings, all gleaming under the morning sun with what looked like steel, white marble and glass. The first of the buildings had "Coven Industries" on its facade.

The next three looked like giant greenhouses, but looking at them gave Chevalier a slight headache, almost like an Escher painting. "What…?"

"The inside of the botanical gardens are significantly larger than the outside," Hannah explained. "And aspect of Mage's power. The first two are closed to the public, but I understand he and Skitter are growing unique plants that have unbelievable medicinal properties. The third is also expanded, but is open to the public."

Across the wide plaza, which Chevalier noticed was dotted with food carts, carnival rides and tables decorated with balloons, was Panacea's now famous clinic, and a curiously designed five story hotel that seemed absent of any straight angles. Beyond that, he could see what looked like the athletic field for the new Coven Educational Complex, an integrated school for all grades. And around the entire area, itself as large as many towns, ran a gleaming new monorail.

He knew from satellite photos provided by Dragon that beyond the school, hotel and clinic was more parkland with a high-rise condo that rose visibly above the nearer rooflines. The condo was reserved for employees of Coven and their families at fixed rent prices. The monorail, however, was new. As in, days new.

They continued walking across the plaza to the hotel, where the official celebration was being held. As they walked, Chevalier noticed a particularly attractive blonde with bright yellow feathers in her hair mingling with the various heroes and politicians. Though Chevalier had been concentrating on the architecture and the heroes, he saw Senator Stillwater and Mayor Christner. More importantly, he saw the current Secretary of Education and the Secretary of Parahuman Affairs.

In the distance, he heard children laughing and screaming as large, animated stuffed animals gave children rides across the basalt pavers. Other kids were riding a carousel or other fast spinning rides.

They finally reached the conference room of the hotel, itself a luxuriously appointed room with muted blue carpeting and sparkling chandeliers overhead. He was just inside when he felt a hand knock on his gauntlet. He knew in his black and gold armor, he struck an imposing figure, so he turned slowly so as not to startle whoever was trying to get his attention.

He saw the girl with feathers in her hair again—Canary, if he recalled. "Chevalier?"

"Yes?"

"Sir, would you and Miss Militia care to join me in an executive conference?"

"But this…"

He saw that the speakers on stage were actually all civilians.

"That's Skitter's father, the CEO of the Brockton Bay Development Company," Canary explained. She had quite a lovely smile, he noted. "This meeting is primarily for investors and politicians. Mage and Skitter wanted me to extend a separate invitation to the various Protectorate leaders for a private meeting in Coven HQ."

A glance revealed Myrddin following another young, attractive woman in the strange half-skirt uniform the Coven members all wore. Other protectorate team leaders were breaking off from the rest as well.

"Very well. Lead on."

"Thank you. Miss Militia, good to see you again."

"You two, Paige. How are your girls?"

The feathered cape grinned happily. "They're starting daycare soon. Qiana and I will miss them, but it'll be good to socialize them more. It'll be the first formal schooling they've ever had now that they're free of the Birdcage."

 _That's right, there are kids there._ "We haven't sent any new prisoners to the Birdcage since Costa-Brown retired last month, but I've not had any reports about what's happening in there."

"The kids have been retrieved and placed with foster homes here in Coven Gardens," Paige said.

"Um, how?"

"Eidolon."

Which made sense. Eidolon could do pretty much anything, so why not be able to enter the unbreakable prison?

They crossed back over the plaza. People continued to mill about, but without the VIPS and heroes he realized most were either Coven employees enjoying a local festival, or tourists out to see the new marvel. He could see people walking out of the third and only open botanical garden with amazed expressions on their faces.

"I'll have to guide you through our wardline," Canary explained as she took their arms.

"Why is that?"

"It's one of Harry's magical protections."

 _Magic. Right._ Myrddin at least recognized that his magic was a power. Mage insisted his magic was not a power, it was just magic. Much like Glaistig Uaine insisted her power was magic, and the expression of dead capes she'd harvested were actual fairies.

The inside of Coven Headquarters actually proved to be a bit of a disappointment. For the most part, it looked like a glorified garage made of marble, steel and glass. Several vehicles were parked along the dock-side wall underneath an admittedly beautiful catwalk. The other wall was lined with large, industrial steel shelves that still held large crates of bound supplies. On the far side of the open area he could see what looked like two stories of apartments tucked snuggly inside the structure, including a second-level patio with chairs and tables.

The center of the space was dominated by a large round table, each with its own microphone and comfortable chairs. Paige led them to a chair between Myrrdin from Chicago and Cinereal from Atlanta. He saw Rime, Alexandria's replacement in LA, Gasconade from Seattle and Bastion from San Jose. Exalt, Eidolon's second from Houston, was there as well. In fact, all the leaders of any Protectorate Team worth noting was there. He couldn't help but notice the tall, stunning and statuesque Narwhal there. Her blue horn rose up easily ten feet from her seven-foot-tall body until she sat down beside Armsmaster and Dragon.

Only Alexandria and Eidolon were still missing.

Finally, their hosts arrived. Despite their company, none of them wore masks. Granted, their identities were public knowledge, but it still seemed odd. Odder than that was how incredibly young they appeared.

For all his supposed power, Mage was not even eighteen years old and looked like a band geek, though one with really clear skin. Shaggy black hair hung over a rather plain oval face. He was decently in shape but not extraordinarily so. His companion on his right was as tall as he was, lithe and athletic with a head of luscious dark hair that hung down to her shoulders and a pair of rimless glasses that shielded an intense gaze. Like him, she looked rather plain.

The girl on his left was shorter than either, with pixie-cut blonde hair and a girl-next-door beauty with her freckles. All three wore what Chevalier was beginning to think was Coven's cape uniform—white trousers with a little half-skirt open at the front with tunics of identical cut but different colors. The blonde's tunic was violet, while the brunettes was a dark gray. Mage's was red with gold trim.

Eidolon walked behind them.

 _Eidolon_ walked behind them wearing white trousers, with a white miniskirt open in front, with his trademark green in a tunic of Coven's cut, and his mask without his hood.

Exalt rose to her feet, her expression of horror hidden by her mask, but audible in her voice. "Eidolon, is this a joke?"

"No, Exalt. I'm sorry, but I'm resigning my position effectively immediately, and am formally joining Coven."

Exalt collapsed into her chair as if shot. Chevalier himself suddenly found it hard to breathe. "But…why?"

"If you have a seat we can talk about it," Eidolon said. "Mage?"

Mage nodded and walked through the narrow gape in the table until he stood in the middle. "I'm about to engage a protection over us," he said. "If there are any Thinkers among you, try to shut off your power. This could hurt."

"Protection from whom?" Chevalier demanded, only seconds before others did.

"From the most powerful and deadly entity on Earth." With that, he reached into a slim pocket on his half skirt and removed a six-foot staff from a two-inch space. He hit the staff on the ground and started chanting.

Though Chevalier did not discuss it openly, and it remained a classified aspect of his power, he could see powers. Quite often they presented as colors, though sometimes he could also see figures of people associated with a particular capes powers.

Mage did not glow with a power at all. If he weren't making the air itself tingle with a wash of energy, Chevalier would not have believed the man was a parahuman at all. Nonetheless, his staff and an intricate series of tattoos on his arms began to glow before abruptly a golden dome erupted from the top of his staff, encompassing the table and all those around him.

Abruptly he fell to the ground, his staff falling from his hands.

"Harry!"

Skitter rushed to kneel beside the young cape, who was slow to pick himself up. "Sorry, took a bit out of me. Don't remember passing out last time Potter cast that ward."

Chevalier felt a small spike of jealousy at the look of concern and fondness on the girl's face as she helped lift her lover to his feet. The staff flew into his hand before he slipped it back into his pocket. The two walked back to their seats, and only then did everyone else sink down.

"So, my cape name is Tattletale," the blonde by Mage's side began. "I'm going to make three opening statements that will hopefully explain why only senior Protectorate Leaders and the Guild is here. What I am about to tell you can be independently verified by Eidolon, or Alexandria if we didn't suffer from personality clashes.

"First, powers are not gifts. Most of us are carrying an alien symbiote from Scion which gives us our powers. Scion sends out these shards of his own body as part of his lifecycle. They are intended to encourage combat and strife as a way to grow stronger. When he believes they have reached their potential, he will then harvest those shards and destroy the multi-dimensional Earth as a means to power his trip to another world, where the cycle repeats. He has destroyed thousands of worlds just like ours."

Chevalier waited for Eidolon to laugh or indicate it was a joke. The most powerful cape in the world merely sat and listened, his face inscrutable behind his mask.

"Second, the Triumvirate were aware of what Scion was. The formation of the Protectorate and PRT was solely to create an infrastructure which might allow us to combat Scion. The avatar that we all see is just the tip of what he actually is. His structure is the size of worlds, spread simultaneously through multiple dimensions. He is, for all intents and purposes, a god."

She cleared her throat and looked at Mage. Chevalier saw a soft golden glow about her head, and a young man with a slit wrist looking at her sadly. She, though, looked at Mage with the same fond smile the brunette did.

"Finally, when Mage and Skitter killed Leviathan with the help of Vista and Flechette, Eidolon discovered that his power could control the Endbringers. With Mage's help, he has gained full control not only of the Simurgh and Behemoth, but of the additional seventeen other Endbringers that would have been activated if the first three ever died. That's why the last eighteen months have been free of Endbringer attacks."

Mage stood back up. Whatever magic he did, it obviously exhausted him. Still, he looked determined. "With the Endbringers under control, and a very real threat to the world on the horizon, the time for playing Cops and Robbers is over. The Triumvirate established the unwritten rules as a means of giving villains a chance to fight the Endbringers. That need no longer exists. What we are here for today to discuss is the elimination of the Protectorate as a United States agency. Instead, I propose the formation an extra-national organization under the auspices of the United Nations for the common defense of the planet against all threats."

"It's been tried," Narwhal said. "Four separate times. The Chinese Union Imperial shoots every attempt down, and there's no longer any central government to talk to in India or Russia. Africa and South America are lost causes and Europe is just hanging on."

"I don't care of the rest of the world agrees or even knows," Mage said. "What I'm suggesting is that we do it anyway. We reopen the United Nations in New York to any nation that cares to send a representative cape with the sole purpose of establishing an international parahuman defensive team. Our charter would be both military and law enforcement."

"The PRT and Washington would never go for it," Cinereal said bluntly.

Mage's grin looked rather wicked. "And what will they do to stop us? The PRT and Protectorate were fictions to make the civilians feel better, but we all know that they held power over you only because you chose to let them. I don't think a civilian oversight committee is a bad idea, but the stakes are too high to risk to simple politics. If we don't act, the world is going to end and all of us will die."

He sank back down. Eidolon stood in his stead. "First, just to be clear, everything you just heard is true. Now let me tell you how all of this started…"

~~Simurgh's Son~~

~~Simurgh's Son~~

The hotel room that Coven provided the leaders of the Protectorate looked luxurious. The king-sized bed was as soft as cloud. The bathroom had a nice walk-in shower and a separate soaker tub. The balcony looked out over the bay. It even had a small wet bar, now littered with several empty bottles. He stood looking out the glass door to the bay as the eastern sky purpled with approaching dusk.

The knock at his door caused Chevalier to turn around. With a deep sigh he walked back to the door and opened it to see Miss Militia on the other side. She carried a box that smelled heavily of Chinese chicken and fried rice. In her other hand, she carried what looked like a milk jug, only filled with wine.

"Uh, come in?"

She walked passed him without a word and he closed the door. By the time he turned around she was halfway to the little table and chairs by the balcony. She set out two plastic bowls and spooned out large servings of the chicken and fried rice. She glanced around until she found a pair of plastic cups and poured out three glasses' worth of wine in each.

She then reached behind her and removed her bandana mask. Her nose, he noted, had a little callous where the bandana rubbed. His own mask was off already, but he removed the rest of his chest plate and his gauntlets.

"What's the occasion?"

She snorted grimly. "I just learned the world is going to end, and our best hope is a horney teenage with two girlfriends. So, we're going to eat, we're going to drink, and then we're going to go to bed together."

Chevalier sat down and met her gaze squarely. "You were always the smart one."


	63. Conquest 2

Wow, this turned into a busy morning or I'd have had this posted sooner. Sorry for now review responses, I had to actually do some work despite being on vacation. You know how it is.

Anyway, I feel obligated to 1) warn of what on the surface looks like some truly offensive behavior on Harry's part; and 2) remind everyone that he has a very good reason to do so and that looks can be deceiving.

This is also a time-skip chapter. So, for your entertainment, I present mass murder and a wedding.

* * *

 **Conquest 8.2**

Once upon a time, Scotia Nebraska was a small farming community of less than 300 people. It's claim to fame was an old, inoperable chalk mine and a high school that was on the verge of closing because it only had 26 students, most of whom would soon graduate and leave the town.

All that changed on one early summer morning two weeks before Taylor's eighteenth birthday and the wedding she and Harry had panned. An hour before dawn, an inhuman scream shattered every window, every computer screen and every cell phone in the town. The Slaughterhouse Nine had finally shown its head again, and within hours all 297 people of Scotia, Nebraska were either dead, or wished very much that they were.

The Spector team had only hours to act before the Nine somehow slipped away again, frustrating the country and the United Nations Parahuman Defense Force. The game of hide and seek between the UNPDF Spector teams and the Nine was on its tenth month, almost since the first Special Parahuman Tactical Operations Reaction team was formed and went after the parahuman murderers. On four separate occasions, the Slaughterhouse Nine struck a small community and escaped after leaving all the residents dead.

Oh, the Spector Teams weren't without some success. They killed a few members here and there—Chuckles the Clown, Hatchet Face, Crimson and Winter all fell one-by-one. The Spector Teams did not try to take prisoners. With the UN Courts finding the group guilty of crimes against humanity, every member of the Nine had a kill-on-sight order.

If it were only that easy.

Harry, Taylor and their team appeared by portkey. Without a word, Imp disappeared from their sight and minds. Smolder and Flechette crouched down at the ready while their squad of ten UN Spector soldiers deployed the drones. The five capes all wore the same uniforms as their mundane soldiers—mottled green-and-gray combat fatigues with adaptive tinker-tech camouflage.

Without a word Harry pulled a pair of brooms from an expanded pocket on his thigh and handed one to his fiancé. Like the rest of the team, her suit was flight capable, but his brooms were silent. They weren't exactly racing brooms, but he'd managed to get them close to eighty miles an hour. More importantly, with the use of magical holyoak, they held charms independently for up to a week, which allowed anyone to fly them.

With Taylor by his side, they began the quick, low flight around the town. "Mark," Taylor said.

Her voice came through right to his ear, but not through a protean charm. Rather, they all wore a linked radio network with com units at their throat that caught the sound of their voices perfectly.

He dropped a pre-made ward stone. Twenty feet later, at her warning, he dropped another. And another. He didn't drop them perfectly, and didn't dare slow down to do so, but even so it took time.

"Mark. Shit, someone's seen us!" Taylor spoke quietly, but urgently. "My bugs are picking up movement!"

Harry dropped another stone, and without having to say anything both of them sped up. He started throwing the ward stones as fast as he could, hoping they were close enough to the twenty feet mark.

"Team, targets are aware," Taylor said into their coms. "Brace for combat. Crawler is coming!"

" _ETA for ward?"_ The voice belonged to their mundane team captain, Dela Cruz.

"Call it another three minutes!" Harry said as he threw another stone, and another a second later.

" _Calling in reinforcements."_

Harry said nothing—he was working too hard to get the ward stones out fast enough. The center of the town exploded with insects and Taylor did her part to slow down the Nine from escaping.

"Shit, Bonesaw deployed something. My bugs are dying, fast!"

"Done!" Harry brought his broom to a halt and jumped down on the ground. He had his staff out of the same expanded thigh pocket that held the brooms a second after and touched it to the ward stone. He looked up just in time to see a solid wall of sharp glass flying toward him.

"Harry!" Taylor warned.

He chanted the activation, poured magic into the stone, and stepped back as the ward stones activated. The scintillating dome of magic shot out to either side, arching up overhead at the same time. The glass struck the wall and disappeared into dust. Behind the attack came Shatterbird herself.

Though her face was partially covered by a rainbow of glass shards she'd shaped into a bird's skull, he could see her darker complexion underneath. He knew she was of Arabian descent, but she looked more like someone from the Mediterranean. Beautiful, except for the rictus grimace of rage. She screamed, but the power in her voice could not penetrate the ward. It did, however, make the ward wall vibrate in a way Harry had never seen before.

It continued to vibrate until the moment Shatterbird struck it, borne aloft by her glass faster than Harry could fly his broom.

Like the glass attack that preceded her, Shatterbird ceased to exist the moment she crossed the ward line. All that emerged was more dust, which flew away in the morning breeze.

Harry tapped his throat piece. "Shatterbird is down. Ward is up."

" _Oh, is that what that big-ass magic dome in front of me is? Didn't realize,"_ Dela Cruz snarked.

"Well, your personnel file said you were from Oklahoma, so we felt it better to use small words so you could understand," Taylor snarked back.

" _Says the high school drop out."_

"Some people are just too awesome for high school," Harry answered. "It was a service to the other students to keep them from feeling like you feel now."

" _Would you all kindly shut the fuck up,"_ Smolder said over the line. " _Eyes on Siberian. She looks pissed. And naked."_

Harry and Taylor exchanged a glance. "Where away?"

" _Southeast, around stone…forty-eight_." Harry stored his broom, then Taylor's too. She closed her eyes, pushed her power away, and then took his hand.

A second later they stood behind Smolder and two of her non-powered team-mates. Siberian ran right toward them on the other side of the ward wall.

"Think it'll hold her?" one of the soldiers, Abercrombie, asked.

"It stopped Shatterbird's power," Harry pointed out.

The Siberian—a startlingly beautiful, completely unstoppable and utterly naked feminine figure with zebra-striped skin who liked to eat people and torture them in various ways (not necessarily in that order)—stopped at the wall and glared at them with black eyes.

"None of this will work if we can't stop her," Taylor noted.

"If it doesn't work, let's blame Dela Cruz," Harry suggested.

The Siberian moved forward, and accompanied by the sinking sensation in Harry's stomach, stepped right through the ward line without any noticeable effect.

"Well, bullocks," Harry muttered. "Activate flight packs. Back off! Back off!"

They had no weapons that could hurt the Siberian. Not even Alexandria could hurt the Siberian, while the Siberian was able to rip out one of Alexandria's eyes—something not even a decade of fighting Endbringers could do. The Siberian killed Hero. The Siberian, along with Jack Flash's thinker power, was why the Slaughterhouse Nine always somehow survived. Not only was she utterly impervious to harm, she could bestow that same power on anyone she touched.

Smolder and the two soldiers backed off and activated their flight packs. Tinker-tech antigravity and compressed, dimensionally expanded chemical thrusters sent the three of them into the air. Harry pulled and tossed Taylor's broom to her, but remained on the ground, watching the monster. In the distance, charging from the town, he could see Crawler coming as well.

The changer cape was the size pickup truck, as black as pitch. He ran on six elephantine legs. He was a monstrous combination of scales, claws, eyeballs, tentacles and acid. He was a thousand times worse than any Hollywood monster, and could adapt to almost anything that didn't immediately kill him.

The UNPDF Think Tank estimated not even nukes could kill him anymore.

The Siberian completely ignored Harry and jumped toward where Taylor was still low in the air, having just lifted off. Harry apparated right in front of her, arms spread with a manic grin on his face.

"Bring those striped boobies to me, babe!"

The Think Tank was not sure if Harry's protective runes could save him from the Siberian's breaker power. But given a choice of having his arm ripped off and watching the love of his life torn to shreds, it seemed a simple decision. She plowed right into him, and he wrapped both his arms and legs around her, burying his face in her perfectly formed if otherwise oddly colored bosom.

Despite the fact he was wrapped around the single most dangerous cape in the world, he couldn't help but bury his face in her breasts and motorboat her. Hard.

As was often the case when Harry took liberties he was not actually at liberty to take, the Siberian found his actions offensive. She demonstrated her offense with a hissing, warbling cry and a claw digging easily through his helmet to his skull. He had no doubt if not for his runes she would have popped his skull like a grape.

Instead, all she did was free his head and face completely, which allowed him to motorboat _and_ suckle!

Naturally, the Siberian found this to be even more offensive. They landed together hard enough to dislodge Harry from her body. Hissing her screams, she clawed at his face. With his runes, he could feel the tips of her unbreakable claws running over his eyelids, nose and mouth. Rather than rip his face off, it tickled slight.

He tweaked her nipples.

She jumped into the air and slammed both feet down on his chest, pushing his entire body a foot into the loamy soil.

 _That_ Harry felt, like a punch to the stomach. She snarled at him before turning her attention to the sky. With effort, Harry forced himself to apparate out of the hole just as the Siberian launched herself into the sky with impossible, physics-defying power and speed. She flew straight toward Taylor, once again targeting the woman Harry loved.

This time Harry landed on her back. "Hey, babe, I'm back!" He leaned forward and wrapped back hands around her chest while contouring himself to her body, like a lover in bed.

This time, the Siberian actually screamed. She spun in mid-air and somehow changed trajectory, sending the two of them straight down at a hundred miles an hour. When they slammed into the ground, this time he sank a full five feet. The Siberian came down with him, punching him with blows that could shatter steel.

Against protections designed to shield against gods, all Harry got from her efforts was a mild headache. Kinetic force, no matter how powerful, didn't effect his runes like energy attacks could.

Abruptly she stopped. In the gloom of their impromptu hole, Harry could see confusion pass across her face.

"You know, Manton, the only thing sicker than me perving the Siberian's body? Is you living as your naked daughter. Rot in hell, you wanker."

The Siberian popped, like a balloon, and was gone.

"Harry, Imp took out Manton. Are you okay?"

Harry blinked and saw Taylor leaning over the hold. "Hey, beautiful. Crawler hit the wall yet?"

"Not yet."

He banished himself out of the hole just in time to see Crawler hit the ward line. Unlike the Siberian, who they learned from Eidolon was actually a projection of power from Dr. William Manton, a former Cauldron scientist who lost his family and went insane, Crawler was simply flesh and blood. And scales. And weird acid-spitting tentacles and shit. Still, at the end of the day his body was made up of actual matter.

And when matter hit a nasty post-Caldosian disintegration ward, it…well, disintegrated.

Crawler didn't even slow down. He ran into the ward wall like a giant six-legged tank. The hind legs continued pushing forward even after the first four were gone, until on momentum alone even his many tails passed through, leaving only huge billows of dust.

Behind them, Qiana landed with two other soldiers. "Holy shit," she said.

"I know, that was amazing!" Harry said.

Qiana slapped his head.

"That wasn't amazing?"

"No, you sick shit! You fucking motorboated the Siberian? The fuck's wrong with you?"

"Hey, it's not my fault she was naked!" Harry said. "Why go naked if she didn't want people in her tits?"

Taylor pulled her helmet off and blew a strand of hair from her face.

"Qiana, it's fine. We knew she'd target me. Think Tank said that Manton had serious Daddy Issues, which is why the Siberian looked like his dead daughter. We talked it over last night. If the ward didn't hold her, Harry would have to distract her long enough to make sure Imp could find and take Manton out, and perving on the shape of Manton's dead daughter was the perfect way to make sure the Siberian didn't the rest of us. Harry was under orders to be as disgusting as possible."

"Plus it make some great footage," Dela Cruz said as he joined them. He was holding up a digital recorder with a powerful telephoto lens. "You are one crazy fucker, Mage."

"Hello?"

Harry couldn't help but wince when he heard the young, innocent-sounding voice. He saw Taylor's eyes narrow as they all turned to see a young blonde girl standing just inside the ward line.

Considering that she had a confirmed kill count of over two thousand people, it was hard to tell that Bonesaw was anything other than a beautiful, innocent child. Blonde ringlets fell around shapely, oval face. She wore a light blue sun dress with an apron around it, and strap on Sunday-best black shoes over white stockings. There was a terrified look in her eyes as she stared out at them.

"Hello? Um, I'm really scared in here. Could you please let me out?"

"Shit," Harry muttered. "Shit fuck shit fuck shit fuck."

"Harry," Taylor warned.

"She's a fucking little girl! You read her file, she didn't want to become a psycho mass murder, Jack forced her to trigger and turned her into a monster!"

Rather than yell at him or slap him, Taylor took his hand and pulled him into a hug. "I know, love. I know. You just can't save everything. I'm sorry."

"But…"

Bonesaw's glistening blue eyes widened a moment in shock before she stumbled forward right into the ward wall. Like Crawler and Shatterbird before her, the beautiful little angel from hell disappeared into a cloud of dust. In her stead, Aisha Laborne appeared and removed her helmet.

"Harry, you gotta get over this not-hittin'-girls shit," she said. "If you saw any of what I just saw, you'd have ACME'd her ass. Now, can you let me outta here?"

Nodding and feeling both shame and relief, Harry touched his staff to the nearest ward stone, deactivating a slice in the dome just wide enough for Aisha to slip through. The moment he removed his staff, the dome reactivated.

"Lookin' good, LaBorne," DelaCruz noted appreciatively.

"Too good for you, Cruz," Aisha said without missing a beat.

Harry tried not to notice, but as beautiful as Aisha was as a punk-rock wanna-be slut puppy, over her two years with Coven she'd turned into an almost stunningly beautiful young woman with a figure that made even Tattletale jealous. She still dyed a violet streak into her hair, but otherwise all semblance from the trashy-dressing young rebel was gone. In its place stood a vibrant, intelligent, well-trained parahuman assassin.

Which was more than a little scary.

"Got Manton, and that fucked up Cherish-Heartbreaker hybrid Bonesaw made. Tried to cut Jack's throat, but he'd been upgraded and I had to run. Mannequin, Burnscar and Damsel of Distress are still in there," she reported curtly.

"Great job, Imp," Taylor said.

"It's what I do," the younger girl said with a shrug. "I'm still a bridesmaid, right? I fucking rock that dress."

"She really does," Harry admitted.

Taylor glared, to which he grinned and kissed her. Flechette showed up with her soldiers just as they broke the kiss. "Jeez, you two, can you give it a rest?"

"Nah, it's good," Aisha said. "They're cute. Like George and Gracie."

About that moment, reinforcements showed up. Eidolon appeared with a thunder-crack. Unlike the others, he didn't bother with tactical gear. In fact, he wasn't costumed at all, save for his mask. Otherwise he was a slightly overweight man in blue jeans and a plaid button-up that made him look like a typical weekend dad.

"So I gather I'm not needed?" he asked calmly.

"Things got dicey with the Siberian," Harry said. "But Imp took her out as planned."

DelaCruz approached the famed hero, opened the camera to show the viewing screen, and played some footage for Eidolon. The older cape watched for a long moment before staring hard at Harry through his mask. Finally, with a sigh, he reached into his jeans and removed a pair of twenties.

"See you back at the HQ, kids," he said as he handed Harry the money. He disappeared with another crack of thunder right after.

"What the fuck was that about?" Qiana said.

Instead of answering, Harry turned and grinned intently at Taylor before she sighed, reached into a pocket of her tactical vest, and removed another twenty.

Imp started laughing. "I get it. He bet Eidolon he could motor-boat the Siberian, and he bet Taylor he could beat Eidolon in a fair bet."

"As sick a fucker as you are, Mage," Dela Cruz said. "We're not done here."

Harry sighed as he pocketed his well-earned cash. "Yeah, I know. This is going to take the rest of the day, though. Imp, any civilian survivors?"

Aisha lost all sense of humor. Instead, she just shook her head with an intense frown. Harry stepped to her side and hugged her.

"Sorry you had to see that," he said to her. "But we could not have done this without you."

"I know. Now get your sappy ass over to Taylor before she gets jealous. You know she doesn't like you hanging off us beautiful people."

"Do you want bed bugs again, Aisha?" Taylor asked sweetly.

"Fuck no."

Harry laughed before stepping to the ward line. He looked to his soon to be wife, who blessed him with a somber smile and nodded back. He then placed his staff onto the ward stone that he'd used to let Imp out and started chanting in Aramaic. He couldn't speak the language at all, but he remembered this particular chant from the many times his previous self had cause to use it. The stone in front of him lifted off the ground. All around, in a massive line that englobed the entire town, other stones followed. More importantly, so did the soil underneath the stones, forming a deep hole that led down to the ward's spherical bottom.

Still touching his staff to the stone, Harry removed his broom, climbed on, and then slowly started flying forward. The stones that ran around the entire one-third square mile area of the town moved in perfect synchronicity with the one Harry directed. Already dust began billowing out of the bottom of the now entirely elevated globe.

The ward did not hold matter, it disintegrated it. While in the ground equal pressure was maintained so there was not significant enough movement to be noticeable in the course of minutes. But with the entire town elevated, gravity eventually did its work.

Houses began to sink into the center of what used to be the town as the underlying rock and soil filtered through the ward, disintegrating into huge billows of subatomic particles that quickly fused back together as mostly hydrogen. Through the ward, Harry caught the briefest look at the remnants of the Slaughterhouse Nine. Jack Slash was clinging to one of Mannequin's mechanical arms, while the former Tinker's other arm had shot out like harpoon to latch onto the roof of the high school.

It did nothing for them, as the high school crumbled inward as well. Harry continued slowly flying inward even as the contracting ward acted as a sieve, filtering out all matter except the find dust which quickly evaporated or combined with oxygen to form a light rain _underneath_ the town. Regardless, well before Harry enclosed the circle, the city of Scotia, Nebraska, and all those within it, were gone. Below, he could see water rushing into the perfectly round crater from the water table below.

He deactivated the ward and recalled the stones into the satchel he'd used to carry them. They flew in a steady line back into the expanded space until all were safely stored. He then flew back to his team. "So, that's a definite proof of concept. I just need a few hundred more stones, and we'll be able to tackle Nilbog!"

~~Simurgh's Son~~

~~Simurgh's Son~~

The Brockton Bay that Taylor and Harry got married in was not the same town they first met in, where Taylor politely told him to fuck off. In the two years since Coven went legitimate, and the old Protectorate was dissolved, the city of Brockton Bay had completely changed.

The Boardwalk was no longer just a shopping district. The new Boardwalk which sprang up in the two years since Leviathan's attack now sported an entire amusement park. The city's reputation of being the safest place in the world coupled with world-class docks and a Tinker-made mass transit system that could have someone go from Boston to Brockton Bay in half an hour ensured plenty of business.

Medical tourism for Panacea's clinic brought in thousands of people every year. Those with just genuine medical needs might see Eir (the newly rebranded Othala under close supervision), but the handful of cosmetic appointments Panacea saw more than paid for the free healing that she provided to children. Adults had to pay, but payment was on a sliding scale of income. Those who made more paid more, while those who made less paid less.

The old slums were gone, replaced by Coven-built (i.e. Mage) apartment towers surrounded by parkland. The newly formed Leviathan Lake in downtown was no longer an eye sore, but instead was expanded with exquisite landscaping with a basalt obelisk listing the names of all those killed as a memorial. The obelisk was provided free of charge by Coven (i.e. Qiana).

More than anything else, though, the absence of any Endbringer attack in the past two years brought to the city, and the world around it, a sense of hope long missing. It was no coincidence that Brockton Bay, and not Boston or Atlanta, received the first large trans-Atlantic shipment of trade goods from Europe in eight years.

The afternoon of June 19, 2013, found Taylor Hebert walking up the aisle in an exquisite white gown designed by Coven's own Parian, who sat on the Bride's side beside her spouse, Flechette, in her full doll costume with her porcelain mask. Though the gown was exquisite, it's material was even more so. The cloth was made from the finest silk that Taylor helped grow with imported silkworms from Korea.

Her business partnership with Parian was very successful.

Taylor's hair was bound on one side, but allowed to fall in a gentle shower of curls around the right side of her face, highlighting the elegant lines of her neck while at the same time softening her strong jaw and wide lips. The dress itself was tailored in a trumpet shape, fitting closely to Taylor's sleek body until mid-hip, where it widened gradually down to the hem.

The neck was cut to cover only one shoulder, leaving her right shoulder and arm bare. It also revealed how well muscled and strong she was, and how utterly flawless her skin was. She had a chapel-length train that swept the floor behind her with a gentle rustle that was lost in the wedding march.

Danny Hebert walked beside her, proudly smiling with her hand on his proffered arm, while with his left hand he had to continually dab at his eyes. He looked very sharp in his coattail tuxedo.

What made the huge crowd of attendees _ohh and ahh_ about, though, was the cloud of monarch butterflies that followed behind her. They rested on her train, and on her bare shoulder, and fluttered gently about her hair in a dazzling display of color and life.

Harry ran out of tissue until George pulled more out of the grey vest he wore under his own coattails.

"Thanks," he whispered, before wiping his own eyes again. Yeah, he was crying. It was either cry, scream or faint, and he figured crying was the best. Across from him, Lisa's eyes glistened too as she smiled so hard her cheeks looked like they hurt.

Beside her, Paige and Aisha both looked beautiful in their deep violet bride's maid's dresses. Taylor asked them to pick out what they wanted, and then bought the dresses for them. On Harry's side, George, Eidolon and Clockblocker, of all people, looked resplendent in black tuxedos with soft grey vests and violet bowties and cumberbuns.

His eyes zoned back to Taylor, and Harry started crying again.

God, she was so beautiful.

The Priest went through the ritualized affair as Danny handed his only daughter off. Harry didn't listen to any of the words. He couldn't have understood them even if he did. All he saw was his Taylor. All he knew was that she was his. All he felt was how much he loved this incredible, beautiful woman.

When prompted he said "I Do." He repeated the vows. He did everything he was supposed to do by rote. He only knew he was Catholic because of his few memories of his parents. His previous selves were anything but. But for this—he wanted all the pomp and circumstance he could have. He and Taylor were ridiculously wealthy, and he spared no expense to give this incredible woman the ceremony she could only have dreamed of.

Before he knew it, they were walking down the aisle of the church as man and wife. Taylor was clutching the bouquet and the butterflies were not just in Harry's stomach, but all around them in an expanding cloud. They stepped outside the church and Harry almost stumbled when he saw millions of butterflies and moths and other beautiful insects wafting through the air. They stretched as far as he could see, as if her range had expanded from a few city blocks to the whole city.

He looked at Taylor, and for the very first time through the whole ceremony saw the same tears in her eyes he had in his.

"You're such a sap," he said, even as he wiped a tear.

She leaned forward to kiss him, their mixed tears on their lips. "Only for you," she whispered.


	64. Conquest 3

A/N: So, in this past week almost a fourth of this stories reviews have come in. You folks have really stepped up, and I can't thank you enough. While preparing this chapter, I saw that I'd chopped the end up into five small chapters. I can't remember why, but on final edit it didn't work. So I consolidated it into three. And with only three chapters left, and with how well everyone has been reviewing, I've decided you all deserve the end. So, here is the first of the final three chapters to be posted this morning, to complete this story.

Thank you all for reading.

 **Conquest 8.3**

" _Scion is no longer on Earth Bet, as far as I can tell_."

Dragon, in her gynoid body, looked cute in a girl-next-door way. Her skin actually looked like Harry's, though without the runes. Rather, the tinker-grown organic tissue had the feel and look of natural skin, but with slightly out-of-balance pigmentation they were still working on.

Armsmaster hovered over her like a protective nanny even in the video feed.

Dinah stood in the door, not wanting to interrupt. The nerve center of Coven no longer lived in the huge converted warehouse that saw them through Leviathan's attack. Instead, it rested in the magically protected, shared basement that ran underneath all of the houses where the Coven capes lived.

Most of Coven was out on their various duties or assignments. Recycler and Little Man were in Mexico helping the struggling, recently re-established Mexican Federation to recycle the shattered remnants that Behemoth left of Mexico City in 2008.

Smolder and Canary were on vacation in California with Bea and Tea, while the rest were either going to school or doing odd jobs around the gardens. Being private, the Coven Gardens school was year around.

Lisa and Jessie Haskins manned the console that particular day. Dinah asked her power and knew that the odds were very high that Taylor and Harry were in their garden. There was even a small probability that they were actually gardening.

She knew she shouldn't have lingered at the door, especially not listening to something that made her insides hurt if she thought about it too hard. She intentionally did not ask her power about Scion, and hadn't for the past few weeks. Every morning she felt heavy and tired, but still refused to ask.

"He's disappeared before," Jess noted.

" _Actually, we've discovered during those times that he was in New York, taking orders from a homeless man who has since died of hepatitis_ ," Dragon said over the video screen. " _It was this man who ordered Scion to be a hero. Otherwise, it's entirely possible Scion would never have done anything at all_."

"That…actually makes all this worse," Lisa noted dryly.

"Perhaps." Armsmaster sounded somehow…less brusque standing next to Dragon. "Meanwhile, you have company."

"I know," Lisa said without turning around. "But I figure if anyone would know, it'd be the super pre-cog. You here with news on Scion, Dinah?"

At that moment, Dinah felt incredibly grateful that Lisa didn't phrase it as a question her power had to answer. "No. Just wanted to let you know Missy and I were going to the park."

"Take Aisha with you," Jess said without looking up from her keyboard, where she was doing something energetically.

Dinah sighed. "She's too cool to be my friend anymore."

"Well, she's not old enough to stay the super-ninja assassin all the time either," Lisa said. "Mama Lisa's orders, she needs to get out too."

Though she did not feel any need to do so, for appearances' sake Dinah sighed. "Yes, _mom_."

She left the two to their video conference and went in search of her friends. It didn't surprise her that Missy was already at the front door, dressed in too-tight shorts and a halter top that Harry would never have let her wear. It showed the keloid tissue on her chest from where Oni Lee once stabbed her.

She showed it off because it pointed like an arrow down to her young cleavage, of which she took inordinate pride, especially when comparing herself to Dinah, who took much after Taylor's figure than Lisa's. "We have to get Aisha to come too."

Missy snorted. "Good luck with that."

They found Aisha gaming online, and Dinah suddenly knew _exactly_ what Jess was doing.

"Sneaky," she muttered. "Aisha!"

"What!?"

"Park, with us, now! Mama's orders."

"Mama can go suck on her teddy bear and die!"

Abruptly Aisha sat ten feet away from her game console as the width of her room doubled. Beside Dinah, Missy smirked as she lowered her hand.

"Oh, you slutty little bitch," Aisha cried.

"Slutty? This is your old top!" Missy snapped back.

"Which pretty much confirms it," Aisha said without missing a beat. Sighing, she looked around the room before blinking and stretching. She was only sixteen, but she looked twenty. Sometimes, though, she acted twelve.

"Alright, come on, girls! But one of you is buying me cotton candy!"

Ten minutes later found them on the wide boardwalk, passing by the central plaza with its exquisite fountain and vendor trucks, and all the people taking pictures of the impossible botanical gardens that housed Harry's increasingly varied magical plants. She could already hear the amusement rides—the music and the laughter. The Ferris wheel rose high over the park, with the rollercoaster shooting on its rails into the sky just past it.

It wasn't a large park, though Dinah knew there were plans to expand it, but the small scale actually made it better. There was no need to pick or choose—they could hit every ride in two hours.

Missy and Aisha were laughing over a particularly tasteless joke about Recycler and Little Man, but Dinah knew they didn't say it to be mean. Theirs' was the thoughtless cruelty of youth—driven not by meanness but by an immature or underdeveloped sense of empathy. Both girls were much harder than Dinah was, in some ways. Aisha was a killer, a facet of her power that shaped her personality.

Missy was a hardened child soldier, having both witnessed and been subjected to horrors most children in the country should not have seen.

And Dinah? Dinah watched, and survived. And _waited._

"I can't believe we're back in school Monday," Missy griped. "I mean, sheesh, it's summer!"

"Fuck, I know! I'm a decorated Spector agent, and I still have to go to school!"

Dinah actually enjoyed going to school a great deal, but she knew her two best friends didn't and so didn't say anything. Aisha, especially, still struggled with her dyslexia. Mage provided her a potion which all but eliminated her ADHD, but it still took hard work for her to even be able to read her text books.

The fact that she managed to stay on the A/B honor roll at school while working as a Spector agent was, as far as Dinah was concerned, proof that Aisha Laborn had grown up. The fact that she could appear in any fashion magazine in the world proved that she was far more beautiful than Dinah would ever be.

Dinah was okay with that too, really. She saw how every boy in a room looked at Aisha. Just walking down the boardwalk as they were, Dinah could see men's eyes following the beautiful teen. She'd even dated occasionally—Clockblocker was one of her more publicized ex-boyfriends. Dinah knew, though, she wasn't going to find what she was looking for and was far too proud to settle.

Missy, on the other hand, acted a little more…brazenly. Dinah wasn't sure whether to admire her or be shocked at just how brazen her friend was with her string of boy toys. She'd been sent home from school more than once for wearing skirts that were too short, or tops that were far to revealing of her quickly developing bust.

Of course, they were all fourteen and knew better than to go too far with a cape whose surrogate father could and would turn any potential boyfriends into dogs.

Dinah tried not to smile when she remembered the time Harry caught one particularly brave boy with his hand under Missy's shirt with her enthusiastic cooperation. That boy barked all the way home. Missy stomped her feet in outrage, yelled and screamed and shouted, but that night grinned when she went to bed.

It felt good for the orphans like her and Missy to know someone cared about them. She and Missy didn't just live in Taylor, Lisa and Harry's huge house, in a real sense Taylor and Harry were their parents. Lisa was more like their wicked aunt who made sure they weren't _too_ well behaved. After all, it was Lisa who Missy did most of her clothes shopping with.

Dinah used her generous allowance to buy Aisha a huge ball of cotton candy. Aisha in turn used her very nice Spector salary to buy Missy and Dinah ice cream as they walked together down the center of the amusement park. Somehow, the fact that all three of them owned a share of the park made it that much more magical. She made a point of looking for and finding all the butterflies. Taylor let her bugs out of the terrarium once in a while to gather wild nectars.

One came and landed on her shoulder, and simply stayed there.

"Hey, Taylor," Dinah whispered.

The butterfly flapped its wings, but didn't fly away. Dinah grinned and resumed eating her ice cream.

They finally reached the giant steel rollercoaster that had become both Aisha's and Dinah's favorite ride in the park.

"Come on, Dinah, at least once!"

Dinah shook her head. "No thanks. Odds are pretty high I'll throw up."

Aisha rolled her eyes, but Missy shuddered. "Yeah, I remember last time. You sure you'll be okay? We're not supposed to leave you alone."

Dinah pointed to the butterfly. "I'm not. Taylor's in her garden."

"With Harry, probably fuckin' like bunnies," Aisha muttered.

A fly flew up Aisha's nose. She snorted and dropped her cotton candy. "I didn't say there's anything wrong with that!" Aisha said to the air.

Dinah tried not to laugh. "You go ahead. I know you'll enjoy it more than me. I'll be over by the fountain."

After only a little more convincing her friends turned and left. Aisha was only a few weeks from turning seventeen, but looked twenty. Missy was fourteen like Dinah, but had already bloomed into a beautiful young woman.

Dinah wondered to herself what she would look like when she was grown up. Would she be beautiful like Paige or Lisa? Would she be strong or elegant like Taylor? What were the odds she would live long enough to find her own Harry Bailey?

 _.09123545645659348912811101018181010238873654758176256495_

Dinah gasped and bent over, clutching her head.

"No!" she whimpered as the odds struck her like hammers, dropping every second. "I didn't mean to, I didn't mean to! Stop it, please!"

Abruptly the air pressure changed. Hot, almost sulfuric air blew at her hair. Dinah jumped to her feet and saw a hole in the world just a few feet away. Around her, the noise and sights and smells of ordinary people going about their business continued unabated, despite this horrid blasphemy scarring reality in front of her.

Beyond the hole, Dinah saw fire. She saw hundreds of misshapen capes and monsters screaming and fighting with unbelievable powers against a golden orb of light that burned everything around. She saw the sky literally falling—massive panels of masonry and other materials that fell about the golden figure to crush the capes below.

Suddenly a figure stepped through, and the scar in reality disappeared. It was a woman, but one so badly injured she looked more like a monster than a human. The entire right side of her face was burned almost to blackened crust, with her skull an angry, glistening red. Her right arm was gone at the shoulder.

She took one stuttering step toward Dinah, staring at her with her remaining, blood-shot left eye.

"Dinah," she said in a hoarse, agonizing voice. "It's happening. I need…Pan…"

Contessa collapsed into a heap of burned and violated flesh.

~~Simurgh's Son~~

~~Simurgh's Son~~

The thing about having an honest-to-God sorcerer in the team was that, when Coven recalled all of its members, they came quickly. Emergency portkeys brought all of the team back together, even Qiana and Paige with their two daughters.

Even though the capes of Coven itself had moved out of the converted warehouse that now housed the administrative heart of Coven Industries, Harry, Lisa and Taylor decided to keep the lower level as a dedicated administrative space for the Spector Teams of Coven. They used the open area for training. They'd also converted some of the lower-level apartments to business offices and conference rooms with the best technology Dragon could provide.

The main conference room that afternoon was filled with every cape in Coven. Dinah and Missy, as the two youngest, sat toward the back of the room. The table, though, held all the active members. There were the original four members, Harry, Taylor, Lisa and Paige. Jess was there, of course, as were the two members who joined them from the Birdcage, Qiana and Stephanie.

The rest of the members joined after their escape: Recycler and Little Man, also known as Sherrel and George Washington; Amelia Lavere, Sabah and Lily. Aisha sat at the end of the table, but within touching distance of Dinah and Missy.

Finally, at the end of the table, sat David, whom the world knew as Eidolon.

Everyone at the table was facing a series of large monitors that held the faces of the world's leading parahumans—Chevalier, Excalibur from the United Kingdom, Matsume from Japan. Dinah saw the Spector leaders from Australia, Germany and the unified Scandinavia. Alexandria was presumably with Chevalier, but off screen.

Dragon was online, as always with Armsmaster hovering just over her shoulder.

The whole room sat silently listening as Eidolon explained who their guest was, and why her appearance was concerning.

"Her name is Contessa," Eidolon said after roll was taken. "She is the most dangerous parahuman on the planet. Her power is, quite simply, victory. Whatever is necessary to win, her Thinker power will provide it to her. Languages, actions, anything. She triggered with a power the Entities never intended to share, and after she used that power as a little girl to kill one of them, it was blunted to prevent her from doing the same directly to Scion himself. Instead, she ran models that led to the founding of Cauldron, and then to the creation of the Sentai Elite, the Protectorate, the Kings Men, and all other organized national cape teams."

"Of which you were a member," Chevalier asked incredulously.

"Yes. Legend, Alexandria, Hero and myself were all Cauldron capes. According to Contessa, Scion has begun searching for and destroying Cauldron facilities in all the various dimensions."

"Do we know what set him off?" Dragon asked the question all others were thinking.

It was Lisa who answered, though. "We did. Coven, the UNPDF—Eidolon controlling the Endbringers. We stopped the downward slide and started clawing our way back up again. The downward cycle of violence has started to wane. Nilbog, the Nine, the Blasphemies and Ash Beast. Hell, we even took out Moord Nag. Those we didn't kill are in the Birdcage. Scion drifted around the world and he couldn't find any misery."

To reiterate what she said, Lisa brought up images taken over the past few months of Scion—drifting over the crater that was once Ellisberg, New York. Or the bubble in Nebraska that saw the end of the Nine. He visited all the craters Harry's rune scheme caused where he destroyed Ashbeast and Sleeper, and hovered over the vaporized town that saw the end of the Three Blasphemies.

Always the Golden Man wore no expression, just a blank face as he stared down at the craters.

"We've known this time was coming," Lisa said. "Since before the UNPDF was founded, we knew that someday Scion would be a threat. We hoped it would be further in the future, but I guess that was naïve. He's our enemy—we're nothing but metaphorical food to him. Why would he stand by and let us grow strong? So, the question is, what do we do to prepare?"

The room broke out in tense conversation. Beside her, Missy stared wide-eyed at the images of Scion hovering over various sights. Dinah squeezed her hand before quickly slipping out of the room and into the hall.

She felt heavy. It was hard for Dinah to describe it, but the feeling of being weighed down had grown over the past few weeks, until now it took all the energy she could muster just to take one faltering step after another.

There was no real conscious thought guiding her, and yet when she looked up she realized she stood at the edge of the door that housed their guest. She opened the door without knocking and stepped inside.

Contessa lay on a plain white bed, the upper portion raised to a slight angle. Though healed, she still wore no clothes because of how badly they were burned. Her modesty was protected by a thick white sheet. Her wrists and ankles were bound, even the newly regrown arm. The room shimmered with constraining magic that prevented the Cauldon cape from even climbing out of bed.

Light brown eyes, the color of desert sand, watched her intently as she walked in. She said nothing at all as Dinah moved to the edge of the bed.

The woman in the bed was very thin, but Dinah knew that was because of her healing. She didn't look that old, but if she were to guess Dinah would think the woman was only a little younger than her own mother.

An IV ran fluids into her left arm, but it wouldn't be enough to restore what she lost in the healing. Just standing there, Dinah could hear the woman's stomach rumble.

Dinah knew the others couldn't forget, though, that this woman kidnapped Paige and engineered the plot that led to Legend's death, the Birdcaging of Harry, Skitter and Paige, the death of Dinah's parents, and a whole string of tragedies.

Dinah's parents were dead because of actions this woman set in motion.

"Why?" Dinah finally asked. It was the only thing she could think to say.

The woman lifted her right hand as much as the strap allowed. Though hesitant, Dinah eventually took the hand.

"I was younger than you, when the first entity came to my village." Contessa spoke just over a whisper, and Dinah realized it was weakness. "Many turned into monsters. They killed my Mama and Papa. I saw them die. Just like you did."

"But…why?"

A single tear rolled down the woman's cheek. "I've done so much. Hurt so many. The Path was all. What did a thousand lives matter against the entirety of humanity? So I did as the Path directed. Now, I'm at the end of the Path. I can see the five. The Path has ended. Here, now. I can't see any further. And I'm scared."

 _Chances are this woman will hurt us?_

Dinah asked her own power, and when she received the answer she patted the woman's hand and left the room. She went straight to the switching cabinets Harry built to take her right to their basement. A short run up to the kitchen and she grabbed lunch meat, condiments, a loaf of bread and cheese, and a gallon of water.

~~Simurgh's Son~~

~~Simurgh's Son~~

"Where's Dinah?"

The teleconference was over, leaving the room in ominous silence. Missy's voice broke the concentration, though. Lisa frowned intently, then glanced at Taylor.

Meeting her friend's questioning gaze, Taylor reached out with her bugs. She didn't discuss it openly, but she liked to keep at least one bug on all the members of Coven while they were in residence. Usually a fly or ant. For Dinah, she used butterflies. And it took only a moment to find her.

She met Lisa's gaze and nodded.

"So what are we doing?" Jess asked from the other side of the table.

Taylor stood, and as she did so did the others. "We suit up and go on alert. It's only a matter of time before Scion runs out of Cauldron targets. Eidolon?"

At the end of the table, the powerful cape stood. "I'll get ready myself. It'll be interesting to actually use Endbringers in combat."

With that slightly terrifying statement ringing in her ears, Taylor led the way out of the room with Harry on her heels, and Lisa a step behind.

"So, for those of us who can't sense things through bugs or super-sleuthing, what's going on?" Harry asked when they were in the hall.

"Dinah's with Contessa," Taylor said.

"Oh, well, that probably isn't good," Harry muttered.

The tableau Taylor found wasn't quite what she expected. Rather than being seduced to the dark side of cape politics, Dinah was very carefully feeding their captive squares of a cut-up ham and cheese sandwich with lots of mayonnaise, judging from the open jar and knife.

Dinah looked over her shoulder at them and smile wanly. "Hey, guys. Um, could you lift the magic on her? My power says she's not going to hurt us."

"Dinah, you aren't supposed to be in here," Taylor said. She tried not to sound angry—Dinah visibly wilted anytime any of them raised their voices to her.

"I had to, though," Dinah said.

"Why?"

"To get you in here. The odds are better with you here, now. And she was really, really hungry. Could you lift the ward, Harry? She came to us, not after us."

"Might as well," Lisa muttered.

Harry released the ward. Contessa sighed with relief at being able to move a little, though for modesty's sake not too much. Harry conjured some stools for the others before—seeing how Dinah was feeding her—undoing the strap of her right wrist.

"Thank you," the woman said softly.

"Panacea's healing does make you hungry," Lisa said. She wore her more predatory grin, while Taylor's face was neutral. "So, what made you decide to come to us, all things considered?"

"Because only Harry Potter can save us."

The answer made both Lisa and Taylor glance at Harry, who shrugged. "Well, I didn't think I was quite _that_ awesome, but she's the super-cape. Maybe I am?"

More conversation was put on hold while Contessa desperately ate another sandwich that Dinah prepared for her, followed by water straight from a gallon jug. She fell back against her bed and stared intently at Harry, enough for Taylor to start to fidget.

"You're not Harry Potter," she finally said. "Not yet."

Taylor's heart beat heavily with a strange, vague fear. She looked at Lisa, who'd paled suddenly as she stared from Contessa to Harry, and then finally to Taylor.

Harry, bless his loving, idiot soul, remained oblivious. "What do you mean I'm not Harry Potter? I have his memories. His magic. I even have his fu…" He glanced at Dinah. "His Runes. Of course I'm Harry Potter!"

Contessa opened her mouth as if to explain it to him, but at the last moment fell back against the pillow of the bed, pale and tired. "The Path ends here," she said.

Lisa's predatory grin had slipped a little. Now she looked pensive. "Your power. It leads you to…what? Victory. Yes. You were Cauldron's boogieman. Your power gave you the steps necessary to accomplish any goal you set. What's your goal here? What brought you here?"

"You know."

Lisa shrugged. "I'm not the one you need to explain it to."

Contessa shuddered and squeezed her eyes shut. "I was six when the Entity crashed by my village. It turned half our people into monsters, and they killed most of the rest. I moved as if in a dream, with this knowledge guiding my steps. I came across a fallen god, broken but healing fast. My power told me right where and when to strike, but it was another woman who had to wield the knife. I was too small. Since then, all I had was the path."

Blinking, she turned to look intently at Harry. "When I was nineteen, I met you in a park. I gave you a stone that healed your bloody knee. I didn't understand then, but I do now. Your god is my god. And it was by her will that I gave that pebble to you. Three years later, the Simurgh came for you. I could not see you in the Path, just as I could not see Scion, or Eidolon, or the Endbringers. The Entity I killed handicapped my power. But when I ran models, I knew that the Simurgh attacked you on purpose. Just like Sphere, I knew you had to be important. I just didn't know why. Not until you formed Coven."

"If we were so important, why did you keep trying to kill us?" Harry demanded angrily.

"The Path didn't require understanding, only compliance. I did what I did because that's what I had to do to save humanity. And the only way to save humanity was to ensure that each of you reached your very lowest point, and then used your love of each other to climb back out."

"Ends justify the means?" Taylor snarled.

"If the ends means the survival of humanity, yes. But all the other plans have failed. All other paths have ended. I can't see anything else. It all ends here, now."

"Will you just come out and say it!" Harry said. He was almost shouting. "What are you talking about?"

"Harry Potter was never alone," Contessa said. She slowly met his eyes. "He was never the only one of his kind. You are not Harry Potter, not yet. But you have to be, if any of us are to live."

Taylor couldn't breathe. Harry sat on his stool staring down at Contessa with a confused expression. Taylor knew for a fact he wasn't that stupid. If he wasn't getting it, it was because a part of him refused to. It made Taylor love him even more, and made what Contessa was telling them hurt twice as much.

Glancing at Lisa, Taylor could see that her friend knew. Lisa knew likely the moment they walked in. But the knowledge seeped like acid into Taylor's mind, and she suddenly found herself wanting to lash out with her power, as if she were back in Winslow trying to resist the urge to kill her bullies.

Lisa cleared her throat. Her eyes glistened a little. "Harry, you told us that Amanda created the entities by mistake, right? That she reincarnated you as a way to fight them for her. But do you think the Harry Potter from your memories, as powerful as he was, could fight Scion all by himself? Even when you killed Leviathan, you didn't do it by yourself. You had Taylor, Flechette and Vista to help you."

"But I'm not alone!" A desperate, familiar whine entered his words. It was the same tone of voice Taylor heard when he begged Legend to understand his life. After these past three years together—after the past few months of being married to this man—Taylor understood. In the back of his mind, he realized what they were saying. It was so painful, though, he consciously refused to process the information. "You guys are my family!"

"Not yet," Contessa said. "You only have your Lady Gryffindor. One is not enough."

Harry froze as if punched. Taylor was afraid he might fall of his stool, but instead he slowly rose to his feet as he stared with horror at the fallen Cauldron cape.

"How the fuck do you know that name?"

More shocking still, the woman sobbed. "It was the last thing I saw, the last step on the path. I saw the five. Gryffindor. Hufflepuff. Ravenclaw. Slytherin. Potter. Five made one. The Path to Victory. I can't see anything else. The Path ends here."

"That's bullshit." Harry blanched to the color of bone as he rose to his feet and shouted angrily. "That's bullshit. That power was bullshit! It wasn't love! It was fake! Maybe those first, but all the rest it was…manufactured! It wasn't love!"

Taylor wasn't even sure when she started crying; when it became almost impossible to breathe. The pervert Harry Bailey who always joked about seeing naked women was gone. All that was left was the confused, angry boy who loved her.

He glanced at Dinah, and saw that the girl too was weeping. She noticed Taylor's glance and drifted to her, taking her hand.

"I'm sorry," Dinah whispered. "It's the best odds."

Harry, meanwhile, was pacing the room flinging his hands around. "…fucking sex vampire using women for centuries. It was all fake, like a drug to make them all go along with it. And he _knew it!_ The fucker knew his power was like a drug, and he kept doing it anyway because he couldn't ever say no to a pretty face. They'd call again and again, and he'd keep coming because they were always pretty and he always wanted…wanted…"

"To save everyone."

Contessa's voice cut through his rant like a laser. She reached up a shaking hand and wiped her eyes.

"He wanted to save everything. He lost his first family, he lost his world. He lost everything he knew over and over again, life after life, and still he came back when called because he was desperate to be a hero—to save as many people as he could."

"And the magic works the way it does because those who created it were not raised with the idea of romantic love," Lisa added. "You've told me about Hogwarts. It would've been founded around the first millennia. A nobleman of King Aethelstan, you told me once. Two captured Viking slaves later freed, and a Basque refugee from Moorish-ruled Spain. That's what you said. Harry, those founders wouldn't have cared about modern ideas of modern love or Romance. Marriage for them was a business contract to secure children."

Harry froze, his expression lost and distance. Taylor found she could not breathe when he finally spoke. " _I dream great dreams, and wield great magic to make them so_."

"It was never enough for you to carry another man's power and memory," Contessa said. She sniffed and wiped her eyes again. "It was never enough to be Harry Bailey. For the world to live, Harry Bailey must die. And Harry Potter must be reborn."


	65. Conquest 4

A/N: Second to last chapter. Keep reading after for the finale.

* * *

 **Conquest 8.4**

The UNPDF and its many Spector teams watched tensely when Scion appeared over Cuba. Because of the small nation's refusal to participate in the UNPDF, the team based out of Miami could only watch and wait.

Dragon dedicated two of her satellites to the island, as well as hundreds of ground cameras that the Cuban Government would not have appreciated her being able to control. All showed the same thing—Scion floating over the center of the island, near the city of Camaguey.

Jess sat next to Amy in the living room of Harry and Taylor's house, close but not touching. Around them, the rest of Coven sat on the various chairs and sofas watching the huge television that had been Taylor's six-month anniversary present to Harry. The television was split showing four different views of Scion—one from orbit, one from a UNPDF reconnaissance drone, and two from repurposed street cameras.

"Please," Jess heard Amy whisper. Despite the girl's aversion to touching, Jess made an executive decision and took her hand.

Amy was so enraptured by Scion she didn't notice, other than to squeeze it with desperate strength.

Scion let his arms drift to either side of his perfect, muscular body. He wore only a filthy white leotard, which someone actually gave him a few months after he first appeared. Even as they watched, those arms gradually lifted at a slight angle.

"No, please," Amy prayed.

Beams of golden light lashed down. The two cameras on the ground recorded a billow of golden fire before both went out. The reconnaissance drone's video blanked out, but not before they caught a plume of oddly golden fire rolling over the land.

The satellite image recorded in terrifying detail how the golden billows of fire ran to either tip of the island, perfectly contoured to the land itself. Where the fire passed, only blackened glass remained.

"Oh God," Amy gasped.

On the couch nearby, Paige covered her mouth with her hands and wept silently. The others simply stared, unable to comprehend the sheer destruction that Scion had unleashed.

Even before Cuba was vaporized, Scion had moved on, north toward the much smaller Bahamas. He'd just passed outside of Cuban waters when Eidolon appeared. The Simurgh floated at his side, while underneath, a new Endbringer shaped like something out of an HP Lovecraft novel rose out of the water, standing on the ocean as if it were dry land.

Scion continued drifting north, as if he didn't think they were worth even pausing for.

~~Forever~~

~~Forever~~

Taylor stayed on Harry when they finished, her arms around his neck and his face pressed against her sweaty breasts. The tears in her eyes just added an urgency to their coupling, almost like that first clumsy, desperate joining in the Birdcage, when they finally found the strength to admit how much they loved each other.

Two and a half years later, that love burned just as bright in the face of losing everything.

"Taylor," he whispered. His arms hooked around her shoulders and pulled her away just enough that he could look up into her face. "I know magic that could take us away. Another world. We could take one of those ships out there, transfigure it to something that could support the team and your parents, fill it would food and water, and we could leave. I'd…do you remember what I said, when you were trying to figure out what to do with Lisa?"

"I know, baby," Taylor whispered. She saw one of her tears land on his cheek as he looked up at her, his face earnest and dedicated and so damn sappy it felt like she was dying to see it. That he loved her so much he'd let all of humanity burn if it meant another day with her.

Worse yet, she wanted it. God, did she want it. Just the two of them, or just them and their friends, in their own little paradise far away from Emma and Madison and Sophia and Scion and…and…

The tears came again. She took his head and pressed his face to her chest again, desperate to feel his lips on her skin. "We can't leave them," she said.

"But she said I'd die," he pointed out. For the first time, she could hear the terror in his voice. "That…that everything I was would die, and only Potter would remain."

"I know, Baby." Her voice broke into a whine, and she hated it. She hated how her body betrayed her.

"Maybe if I draw up a ward or…or…" His voice died, and once against he simply leaned against her, his forehead under her chin, and she cradled his head in her arms.

When she felt his head nod, she sobbed. "I'm sorry," she said, gasping between the tears. "Oh God, Harry, I'm so sorry!"

He pulled her back, taking time to gently kiss each breast before moving up her neck to kiss her mouth slowly, luxuriously. They parted, and though he had tears running down his face and his nose was red, he smiled at her.

"Don't ever he sorry," he whispered to her. "I'm not. I got to love the most incredible woman in the world. Nothing else matters to me. I got to love Taylor Hebert, and that makes me the luckiest man to ever live."

"Doofus," she wept.

"Yeah. Your doofus. No matter what happens, I'll always love you, Taylor. My wife. My…everything. I love you."

She took his hands and kissed him, before rocking slowly on him in one desperate moment of love.

~~Forever~~

~~Forever~~

The world watched in horror as the Endbringers fought Scion over southern Florida. The giant monsters attacked the Golden Man with perfect coordination, but try as they might they could not hurt him. Dragon's satellite coverage was the only dependable coverage, since any drones that came to close burned out from the vast energies released in the battle.

The Florida Spector teams didn't even try to engage Scion—instead they used their various powers to try to evacuate as many people as they could. There was no question that Scion was moving north—even with Eidolon and the Endbringers fighting a delaying action, the Golden Man continued north.

Suddenly golden flame billed not around, but through Behemoth, driven straight down his mouth by Scion. The Hero Killer made a vast roar that made peninsula crack and lava come sheering up in walls that slammed against Scion without effect, but it could not stop the golden flame.

Abruptly Behemoth died—his body blasted apart in a mushroom cloud that obliterated the remains of the everglades.

Cthulhu, the newest Endbringer, struck with a pillar of black water and lightning that wrapped around Scion like crystal, while the Simurgh had somehow built a weapon that unleashed a white beam that moved deceptively slow, but which struck Scion and for the first time seemed to at least cause irritation.

Even as they struck, another Endbringer appeared—this one like a giant floating ball with a man's head on the top. Still Scion continued north, heading over Miami.

~~Forever~~

~~Forever~~

He washed her body with loving care, running the loofa over her skin slowly and carefully. He wore an expression of intent concentration even when he ran the lover over her sex, or her breasts. She did the same, only with a washcloth since he didn't like loofas. The water felt on the verge of scalding hot, leaving her skin red but his protected by his runes.

They finished, knowing that time was running out but desperately wishing they could remain. Like the loofa, he toweled her dry, starting with each ankle and moving up. He tested how dry she was with a kiss, all the way up her body. When she was done, she did the same.

They dressed in comfortable summer clothes—shorts and a T-shirt for him, a loose white summer dress for her. She held his hand and the two walked barefoot from their bed room into the living room of their home, where all the rest of Coven was watching the end of the world on television.

"He's already in South Carolina," Lisa said when she saw them emerge. She sat on the couch between Missy and Dinah. "He's coming here. Eidolon's already burned through eight Endbringers, and every team that's engaged Scion has died, 100% casualties. Dragon's actually talking to Glaistig Uaine and Lustrum in the Birdcage about helping. It won't be enough, but that…you decided."

Paige sat up, looking at them. "Decided what? Lisa, what did you and Contessa talk about? I know everyone was upset."

Harry opened his mouth, but his voice cracked. It fell to Taylor.

"We're going to perform a magical rite that Contessa thinks will help. But we can't do it alone. We need…shit."

"They need four of us who are of at least the age of consent and who are not involved with anyone. The ritual…may end up linking us to Harry."

"Linking you how?" Qiana demanded.

"Like a fucking harem," Lisa said.

"What, like two girls wasn't enough?" Jess asked.

"I never slept with him," Lisa snapped, cheeks flaring. "Not like…not like that. But yeah. I'm…I'm one of them. I guess I always was. Taylor, obviously. But we need three…"

"I'll do it!" Aisha said, jumping to her feet. "I'm almost seventeen. And if any of you bitches think I'm a virgin, you got another thing coming."

Missy started to stand, only for everyone to say, "No!"

Missy jutted her chin out, until Harry shook his head.

"You're my daughter in everything but blood," he told her with a sad smile. "I couldn't."

Stephanie stood up, clutching her toddler son Peter's hand. Peter was old enough to know something was wrong and was teary-eyed from it. "I'll volunteer," she said softly. "I mean, you've already seen me naked, right? You healed me, and saved my son, and gave me a life again."

Taylor looked around the room with a sinking feeling. All the rest were involved with each other. Flechette joined just to be with Parian, while Jess and Amy had their weird thing—Amy was far more feminine than ever, while Jess had actually cut her hair shorter. Sherrel actually sat on George's lap, looking diminutive next to his bulk, while he held her protectively. Qiana and Paige held hands, each of them with one of Qiana's girls.

Movement drew her eye and saw Contessa step into the room, a blanket wrapped around her like a toga. The food and Amy's power aided her metabolism sufficiently that she already looked healthier. She was the oldest woman in the room, but in some ways was no more mature. She was a product of her power, stripped of the need to make choices until that very instance. Meeting her dark eyes, Taylor felt a surge of rage and hopelessness, followed finally by the cold realization that they had no choice.

Lisa followed her gaze before nodding. "And now we have five. It guess it's time."

~~Forever~~

~~Forever~~

"Will it hurt?" Stephanie asked.

"Wish I knew," Harry said. "I have no idea what I'm doing. Harry was never awake for this part."

They took the switching cabinets back to the lower level of Coven Industries, near the first runic heart stone Harry ever created. The city—in fact the entire Eastern Seaboard—was on alert. Evacuation efforts were underway, but it was impossible to evacuate a city in under an hour. Over a hundred thousand people died in Charleston, while the casualties for Florida were estimated to be in the millions.

For Brockton Bay, with the largest single team of heroes, the people stayed home. The building, like all the rest of Coven Gardens, was empty. The six of them walked across the smooth floor of the lower level until they reached the exact center and the hole where the building's heart stone rested.

"So, uh, in his previous lives the petitioners would…ah…you know, stand around this rock that held part of Harry's soul. They'd say the words and bleed on it, just like when I attuned you guys to the wards, and Harry'd be reborn."

Taylor noticed how his cheeks flushed. "Is your soul in that rock?"

"No! I mean, I don't think so. The way Harry got his soul in the stone was…" His cheeks flushed again. "I mean, you can't imagine what fueled my puberty."

"It's inside you," Contessa said. "It has been, ever since you were a child."

"I don't know what that means, though!"

"Harry, think," Lisa said. "We're running out of time, and Eidolon's running out of Endbringers. You changed, back in Coil's base. You asked Ballistic to shave your head, and the next day you had hair and runes. I know Jess tattooed them for you, but how did you make them work?"

"I just, you know, put the amulet there, and they worked."

Taylor's breath caught. He had an amulet in his hands. More than that, she could see his runes now, standing out darkly against his pale skin. Henna tattoos, still dark as if they had been applied just yesterday. Harry stared down at the intricate golden amulet in his hand, then his hands themselves. Then he reached up abruptly to his head, only to sigh when he felt his hair.

"Whew, afraid I was bald," he said sheepishly.

Contessa stepped forward and took the amulet from his hand, and then placed it on the ground. "Do you feel your magic, Harry?" she asked.

"Of course, it's…it's…" Harry's eyes widened as he looked desperately at Taylor. "Fuck, my magic! It's gone! It's not there!"

"It was never yours," Contessa said. She somehow sounded sad and stern at the same time. "You were the vessel to carry it into this world."

"But…but…does that mean…you guys don't need me, then, right? I don't have to die, just take the magic and you can make Harry Potter."

"Is that how Harry's magic worked?" Lisa asked. Her eyes were red, but she wasn't crying yet. "Is that how he became immortal?"

"No, he…" Harry looked down at the amulet, his expression twisting with emotions that Taylor could only guess at. She wanted so much to hold him, and kiss him. Something stopped her, though she couldn't say what.

"I don't want to die," he whispered. He sounded so young, so broken.

Taylor couldn't help her sob, though she covered her mouth with both hands.

"Remember this, then," Contessa said. Her own eyes were red, but her voice clear. "You know your God. You know she exists, and that souls are eternal. This is not your end, Harry Bailey."

"Is that your power talking?" he asked bitterly.

"No, it is what I choose to believe."

"I…" Harry's voice cracked. He looked around the circle of women, until his eyes rested on Taylor. "What do I do?"

"Lay down, Harry," Contessa said. "Lay down and put the amulet on your chest."

He stood frozen, until Lisa of all people came and took his hand. Taylor followed a second later, and together they helped lower him down to the floor. He still held the amulet until Lisa took it from him and placed it on his chest. She then leaned down and kissed him.

Abruptly, she grinned even as she had to wipe a tear away, stood, and pulled off her blouse.

"Lisa…?" Taylor asked.

"All this time, and he's never seen the full package," Lisa said. "It's the end of the fucking world, I figure he's earned it."

She undid her bra and then shimmied out of the skirt she wore, standing utterly naked in front of Harry.

"I'd have loved to have a picture of you on my old phone," Harry said.

Taylor turned as Contessa casually let her sheets fall, revealing a ridiculously beautiful body.

"Oh, this is so fucked up," Aisha muttered.

Stephanie shrugged. "He's already seen me, when he healed all my acid burns." Knowing her son was safe with Paige and Qiana, Stephanie quickly stripped as well. Harry's eyes glistened as he stared at them. "You guys _would_ make me fucking die with a stiffy," he muttered.

Taylor never realized it was possible to laugh and cry, but she did so as she stood and stripped as well.

Aisha was the last, and shrugged.

"Fine, but don't go feeling inadequate because I have such a rockin' body."

The worst part about that statement was that, when she stripped, she really did.

"Damn, Aisha," Harry muttered.

"You should have seen her brother," Taylor said. "The Laborns were just all beautiful."

"Sit around him," Contessa said. She herself complied, kneeling on the floor so close Harry could have caressed her thigh. She pulled a small paring knife from the fallen sheets that previously covered her. Lisa knelt beside her, right next to Harry's head. Taylor took her position right over his head, so that when he looked up he met her eyes. Stephanie knelt beside her, while Qiana knelt beside her.

"This is like every dream I've ever had," Harry said. His voice cracked again. "This is so completely, utterly fucked up. You girls know you're going to be like…sex slaves to Harry Potter, right?"

Taylor was about to tell him that she'd do anything for him, but Aisha spoke first.

"If there's any part of him like you, it'd be worth it," she said.

He turned and stared. She grinned and cupped her breasts. "Been waiting two and a half years for you, dumb shit."

Contessa handed the knife over to Taylor. "You know the words, Harry. You're the vessel. Tell us."

Harry cleared his throat and looked up intently at Taylor. "Um…you say, 'In the name of Lady Gryffindor, I would die for him'. You have to cut your palm, not your wrists. Sorry, I can't do a…" His voice cracked again. "I can't do a numbing charm right now."

Taylor nodded. "It's okay." She cut her palm without hesitation and let the blood fall on the amulet. "In the name of Lady Gryffindor, I would die for him."

She passed the knife to Stephanie. "What do I say, Harry?"

"Same thing, only…you're Lady Hufflepuff."

"Hufflepuff, really?"

He shrugged. "It was a translation from Pictish to Latin to English. She was a wind elemental witch."

"Okay." Stephanie sighed, cut her palm with a little wince, and let it bleed on the amulet. "In the name of Lady Hufflepuff, I would die for him." She looked around. "Who's next?"

"Lisa," Harry said. "You're Ravenclaw."

Lisa didn't even wince when she cut her palm and bled. "In the name of Lady Ravenclaw, I would die for him."

Harry looked at Aisha, who blushed under his gaze. "You're Slytherin."

"Slytherin?"

"He represented ambition and cunning. The Slytherin's prized sneakiness and tactics. You were born a Slytherin, trust me."

"Where they hot?"

"Oh, yeah."

"Good enough." Aisha cut her palm and said the words clearly.

Finally, the knife came back to Contessa.

"And who am I to be for you, Harry?" she asked.

"Potter."

She cut and bled. "In the name of Lady Potter, I would die for you."

Harry leaned his head back, waiting for something. He glanced up at Taylor, and suddenly grinned. "Huh, looks like I got to see you all naked for…"

Abruptly his back arched clear off the ground. He opened his mouth and screamed, and then fell completely still against the floor. Taylor didn't see any lights or sounds. Just her Harry screaming in agony, and then her Harry still. The amulet was gone, as were the henna tattoos.

"Harry?" Taylor asked. "Baby?"

She leaned over and felt at his carotid artery. Try as she might, though, she couldn't feel any pulse.

"Baby, wake up!" She held her hand over his mouth, but could feel no breath. "Lisa, he's not breathing!"

Taylor pushed Lisa and Contessa out of the way as she performed CPR on her husband. She pinched of his nose and blew into his mouth before trying to start his heart again.

"Come on, you god-damned Doofus, breathe!" She screamed at him and hit his chest. "Damn it, Harry, don't leave me here alone!"

"Taylor, it's…it's over," Lisa whispered. "It didn't work."

"No," Taylor whispered. She shook her head as the tears soaked through that goofy Metallica T-shirt of his. "No, it…he's just playing. He wouldn't leave a group of naked women. He'd ask us all to go on the monorail with him, I know that that's why he built the damned thing. He's not…he's…"

"Harry Potter had to die before he could truly live," Contessa said gently. "And Harry Bailey had to die for Harry Potter to live again."

Taylor looked up, a flare of rage overriding the grief her mind could not process or comprehend. "This is your fault!" she screamed. "We wouldn't be here if…if…"

She had to stop talking, because a sudden wave of heat washed over her with such intensity it left her gasping. Sweat beaded across her forehead and chest, and suddenly she had a burning desire to make love to her husband again.

Beside her, Lisa blushed down to her navel and gasped.

"Fuuuuuuck," she whispered.

Even Contessa appeared flushed.

"What's happening?" Aisha demanded to know. "Why do I wanna go fuck somebody so hard?"

Harry opened his eyes. He opened his eyes, and the overwhelming heat and desire that came with it faded into the back of Taylor's mind. It was there, waiting for a touch or word to come crashing through all semblance of self-control, but for the moment she could think.

"Harry, is that you?" she asked. She could hear the naked, desperate hope in her voice, but didn't care.

He met her gaze, and as she stared at him she realized with a sinking feeling that the color of his eyes were different—where before they were a deep green, the green had now intensified into a patently unnatural color. More than that, she could see it. Her Harry, when he looked at her, looked at her with mindless adoration, like a puppy or a child. It was as if she were the whole of his existence, and nothing else mattered.

Now, he looked at her with affection, and a wry, wistful smile that she'd never seen on her husband's face.

"I'm sorry," he said.

His accent was different. Harry's British accent had faded over the years while in America, but was still noticeable. Now the accent was gone—she couldn't tell what nationality he was.

"You are Harry Potter," Lisa said. It wasn't a statement.

"Yes."

"Do you remember Harry Bailey?"

"Yes." He stood, seemingly unaffected by the five naked women about him, and examined the room. "He did well. A good kid. He deserved better than…" He motioned to himself. "This."

Taylor felt numb inside. Even with the banked fire of this strange, artificial desire in her mind, she felt numb as she looked at the man wearing her husband's body.

"He's gone?" she asked. "My Harry?"

Potter stepped back and knelt down in front of her. He took her hand and looked her in the eye. Her Harry would have been devouring her naked body—this imposter didn't seem to care. Instead, he held her hand and stared at her intently.

"A wise man once told me that love was the most powerful thing in the universe. I didn't know what he meant then, but I do now. Love isn't powerful because it can make you fly or give you special magic. Love is powerful because those who truly feel it inside can give up anything in its name. Harry Bailey loved you so much, Taylor, that he was willing to die for you. And you, Taylor, loved him and the world so much, you were willing to let him. And that makes you powerful. And I'm going to need that power to save the world."

"He's gone."

"Not so long as you remember him," Harry Potter said.

He stood, only to strip off his own shirt and shorts, until he too was naked. Taylor looked around the circle and noticed how Aisha and Stephanie were both blushing intensely. He sat down and with a sweep of his hand all five of them suddenly moved around until they sat in a hemisphere facing him.

"I know this is hard for all of you," he said. He sounded so different from her Harry—so old and measured. He even moved differently, sitting still like an old man, until he had reason to move. "You sacrificed a lot to bring me into this universe, but now I have to ask you to sacrifice even more."

The door slammed open in the distance and Paige came running out. "Scion's just nuked New York! Eidolon's out of Endbringers. Dragon somehow got Glastig Uaine out of the Birdcage, but they're only slowing him down a little, you need to…" She got closer and saw they were all naked.

"Um, I'm not sure you have time for that," she said with crimson cheeks.

Harry ignored her and looked back at the five women. "This creature, this entity, was intended to be something different. Something great, and powerful. But the Creator made a mistake, an error driven by loneliness. She set the stage for me to be here, but understand that I, by myself, am not powerful enough to destroy it. We would need the magic of tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands, of powerful witches and wizards to destroy this thing."

"How?" Aisha demanded.

Lisa, though, paled as her power delivered an answer. "By doing the same thing to us that we just did to Harry."

Aisha frowned in confusion. "I don't get it."

"Not quite the same, but similar," Harry said. "Your Harry Bailey was not a wizard. He was a boy charged with carrying a seed of magic inside him until the time was right. You, though, all of you are now witches. You don't realize it, yet, but the magic is already attacking the parasites in your souls. It is rewriting your essence to that of magic. If we do the summoning ritual, it will not kill you. It will make you each a thousand times more powerful than I ever was. You will carry within you the entire lineage of my wives."

"And then, when we're done?" Lisa demanded. "Is there an off switch to send them away? Do you think hundreds of thousands of personalities can fit into a single mind?"

"For what I plan to do, I have faith things will work out," Harry said. "And I have good reason for that faith. I'm asking you all to have a little more faith as well, in yourselves, and in your world."

"Do I have to cut myself again? 'Cause that was kind of bullshit," Aisha asked.

"No, not you."

He passed a hand over his left wrist. As he did so, the runes darkened again as they lost power. He looked up at each of them. "Will you help me save the world and kill this son of a bitch?"

"Why not?" Taylor asked bitterly. _What else do I have to live for?_

"We've come this far," Stephanie said.

The others simply nodded.

"Okay." Harry touched his wrist, and almost immediately it began bleeding. He dipped one finger in it before reaching out to Taylor. She didn't shy away when he touched her chest, just above her breasts.

"In the name of Godric Gryffindor, Earl of Wessex, Wizard King of the Valley of the Boars, I would die for you."

The blood on Taylor's chest felt hot. He was already moving on to Stephanie. "In the name of Helga of the Blowing Winds, Wife of Godric, I would die for you."

He turned to Lisa, who pushed her chest out. "In the name of Rowena, daughter of the Raven's Claw and mother to Helena, I would die for you."

Aisha, not to be outdone, pushed her considerable breasts out further than Lisa. "In the name of Salazar De La Slytherin, Husband to Celeste, Father to Diego, ravisher of Rewena, I would die for you."

Taylor frowned at that, but he had moved on to Contessa, who sat unmoving. "And you. In the name of Harry Potter, son of Lily and James, the Boy Who Lived, the Forever Mage and he who sacrificed all so that others might live, I would die for you."

By the time he sat back in front of them, his wrist was already healed. "In the name of love eternal I call you, all those bonded to Harry Potter. Across the veil of time and space, I summon you in my name. Come to me."

The banked desire that was not Taylor's own abruptly went out, replaced by a sense of pressure that made her ears pop and her bones tremble.

"Come to me," Harry intoned again.

The pressure grew more intense, pushing down on her skull like an anvil. "What…?"

"Come to me."

Something _cracked._ Taylor screamed as she felt the entirety of her existence blown away by a tidal wave of minds and personalities and words. She fought and grasped for any semblance of herself in this raging river of souls, but she started sinking. Agonizing bits of herself started to fall away, as if consumed by all the souls around her.

Before, abruptly, it ended.

Taylor stood, still naked, in a room with stone walls. A little breakfast nook sat by a window overlooking a rolling, emerald countryside. In the distance, she could see sunlight shining off little waves in a lake.

Across from her sat a woman she didn't recognize, as naked as she. She looked Taylor's age, with long bushy hair that fell about her shoulders. Her breasts were somewhat larger than Taylor's, but nothing that would make Aisha worry. She was attractive, but not extraordinarily so, though she was just as pale as Taylor.

"Where are we?"

"The living room of my apartment at Hogwarts, just over twenty-three billion years ago."

She sounded English, even more English than Harry. Or, if she were honest with herself, like a BBC newscaster, whereas Harry sounded like the extra of a BBC drama. Proper pronunciation.

"That's a long time ago. I thought the Universe was only thirteen billion years old."

"Yours is. This was from my Universe. Harry Potter's Universe."

The door opened and Harry Potter walked in. Only, he was older. He looked heavier, but it wasn't fat. Rather, he'd matured and put on more muscle. Children came running, laughing, and for a brief moment Taylor saw a hint of that same adoration her Harry showed her in the way he greeted each of the three children.

Then another woman entered—lithe, petite and blonde. Two children ran in with her, screaming "Papa! Papa!"

Then another woman, and another, and another. Other than the brunette with eyes like sapphires and the cute red head with an ass Taylor felt a little jealous of, none of the women were extraordinarily beautiful. And yet he kissed each and every one passionate, before playing with the kids as if a kid himself.

"This was Harry Potter at his best," the woman said. "And this was Harry Potter at his worst."

Abruptly the castle was gone, blasted out across the rolling countryside that had been reduced to blackened glass and ash. Mixed in the rubble, Taylor could see mangled limbs.

"Why are you showing me this?"

"For perspective. To understand. Harry is not perfect, he can make mistakes, but always he is motivated by love. I know you lost your Harry, Taylor. I'm sorry for you. Like you, I had to share the man I loved with other women. The bonds made it work, but always a part of me hated the fact that he was not mine alone. All of us understand sacrifice. We know what you gave up. Because of that, we honor you and call you our sister. It would be easy for you to be lost in the chorus, but I'll stay with you. I'll hold them back."

"But…how? Who are you?"

The woman smiled as she stepped forward, took Taylor's shoulders, and leaned up to kiss her cheeks.

"I'm Hermione, Taylor. I was Harry's first Lady Gryffindor. I was his first love, and above all others, I am the one he remembers most often. Stay with me now, we're about to finish the fight and destroy Scion."

"But how?"

"Because, Taylor, we know the true name of God."


	66. Conquest 5

A/N: And here we have the finale of Simurgh's Son. Thank you all for reading.

* * *

 **Conquest 8.5**

Paige stumbled back with first Taylor, then the other girls started screaming. They all fell back to the floor of the lower level, convulsing violently.

"What did you do?" Paige shouted. She laced power into her words. "Tell me what did you do to them?"

Harry Potter spun and slashed down with his hand. An invisible force pushed her against the floor.

"I know you care about your friends, so I won't hurt you," he said. "But if you try to use your power on me again, I will render you unconscious."

 _My God, he doesn't even sound like Harry!_ Paige thought desperately.

By the time he finished, the screaming had stopped. Harry turned and Paige lifted her head to look as she saw the five girls climb to their feet. Her breath caught in her throat when she saw a brilliant, almost painful white light emanating from their eyes.

"Harry, my love, what did you do?" While it was Lisa's lips that spoke, the voice sounded like a chorus of a million women all speaking at once.

"My goodness, this body is beautiful!" That was Aisha. "However did you manage to get a supermodel to do the ceremony?"

"Ladies, we have no time." That was Taylor, though again it sounded as if entire nations of women spoke through her. "The Beast is coming. Your hosts memories are within you. Know what they know. Harry, we know what we must do. Are you ready?"

Before he could answer, the ceiling overhead began to glow a bright gold.

"He's arrived," Harry said.

"Good timing," Stephanie's body said.

"The timing, as with all things, was intentional." That was Contessa, only like the others her voice sounded like a chorus. "If Harry Potter entered this realm at any other time, the Beast would have destroyed the world immediately. It always had to be this way."

"My loves, it's time," Harry declared.

The ceiling of the building, which because of Harry's magic could have withstood nukes and Endbringers, melted like so much butter before the golden beam of Scion. The monster himself floated above, his face froze in an expression rage.

Abruptly, Harry and the five avatars of his history were gone. Paige, suddenly free, scrambled to her feet and ran to the switching cabinet.

~~Forever~~

~~Forever~~

Eidolon tried not to resent the fact that Glaistig Uaine wasn't even winded from the two hours of straight fighting up the eastern seaboard. He was exhausted, physically and emotionally. He couldn't even guess at the millions Scion killed, though every time they managed to push the monster past a city without destroying it he considered it a win.

Only the efforts of he, the delusional Glastig and the last of his Endbringer seeds was all that kept Scion from burning Washington, D.C. off the map.

When the Endbringers ran dry, Spector teams came to put up a constant wall. He wasn't sure what Coven's plans were, but for some reason Contessa's arrival there convinced him there had to be a plan.

So, he fought with all his might beside the mass-murdering cape who gathered the powers of those she killed, or who died. Even as he watched, she harvested the powers of those cape Scion killed, getting more powerful even as Eidolon himself grew weaker.

Chevalier's voice pinged in his ear. "We can't hold the line, we've lost too many capes! Fall back!"

Below, Brockton Bay beckoned.

"'Tis time for the play to begin, is it not, High Priest?" Glaistig said. Though she was easily thirty years old, she looked like an adorable, blonde child of twelve. It was disturbing at best.

"We need time to regroup," he said. "Go, I'll try to hold him."

"Without your disciples, you cannot," she said.

Alexandria settled the discussion. She blasted by both capes like a gray missile and flew straight at Scion, just like she would Behemoth or Leviathan.

Golden light bloomed. The strongest brute in the world didn't even make a sound as her body vaporized. Eidolon stared at the spot where she died, trying to process the loss of a woman he'd known for over twenty years.

"Huh. You know, I never did like her."

Glaistig laughed even as she harvested Alexandria's power.

"Fine."

He backed off, retaining flight and teleportation as well as a shielding power. He could only wield three at a time when not controlling Endbringers, but for a retreat those three were ideal. He flew backward quickly as Glaistig sent her shadows against Scion to buy the retreating capes a few seconds.

It was too late, though. Eidolon didn't even realize they were over Coven Gardens until the golden beams shot down into the steepled roof of the original Coven building. The air around the building shimmered with magic that held the golden beams at bay for longer than anything Eidolon had been able to come up with.

But even that magic was not enough. The magical protections collapsed. The beam blasted away the top levels of the building entirely and immediately started on the floor below. In seconds, it too was gone.

Eidolon switched his teleportation power out for magnified vision. What his power relayed was a naked Harry Bailey, and equally naked Taylor Hebert, Lisa Wilbourn, Stephanie Schneider, Aisha Laborn and, of all people, Contessa herself.

 _She is a fine-looking woman,_ he couldn't help but think to himself.

Scion raised his hands to strike, but instantly all six were gone. They reappeared in the air around Scion, somehow fully clothed in long, flowing robes of various colors. Bailey, Hebert and Contessa all wore red and gold robes. Wilbourn wore blue and silver, Schneider wore yellow and black; and Laborn wore green and silver.

They began to spread out from each other, shimmering as they did so, until before Eidolon's enhanced eyes they began to multiply. Only…only they were not the same women. He zoomed his vision further and saw different faces on each of the women that were appearing. They continued to spread out from each other, floating in mid-air, until Eidolon began to see a pattern.

They were englobing Scion.

The monster raised his arms and unleashed the golden beams. Those in the beams path shouted a single word that Eidolon could not make out, and a shield appeared that somehow held the unstoppable attack at bay. Still, more bodies appeared, spreading now across the sky in a giant globe.

He sank back down to the top of a nearby skyscraper. Glaistig landed beside him, while other capes who survived the desperate rear-guard action joined them. Glory Girl, in her Spector uniform, stepped forward.

"What's going on!"

"It's Coven," Eidolon said. "I don't know what the plan is, but I don't want to get in the way of it, either."

"Who are all those people?" Glory Girl demanded.

"I don't know."

Eidolon switched his shielding power out for a thinker ability. At a glance he identified over a hundred thousand women now. Between the Thinker power and his enhanced vision, he knew with certainty that every woman was unique, though all of them wore the same five colors as the first to appear. Nor were there any men, just Bailey, and…now two hundred thousand women forming a giant globe.

Within, Scion unleashed more than his golden glow. Having fought the bastard non-stop for two hours, Eidolon knew that Scion had every power, with no limits on usage. He fought with gravity and dimension and exotic energies beyond the most powerful Tinker's wildest dreams. He saw portals to other worlds open within the globe, only to stutter closed again under the combined power of a quarter million women and one man.

Suddenly, in a chorus of voices that rang out so loudly glass chattered through the city, the globe of women and Harry Bailey spoke as one individual in a chorus of a million voices.

" _AMANDA ROGERS, WE SUMMON THEE. AMANDA ROGERS, WE SUMMON THEE. AMANDA ROGERS, WE SUMMON THEE."_

Suddenly, everything was different.

Eidolon zoomed down with his vision and replaced his thinker power with augmented hearing. What he saw were Harry Bailey and the five original women standing at equidistant points on their plaza around Scion, who stood on the ground with an expression that Eidolon could only describe as confused.

In front of him stood a new woman. She was dressed in a form-fitting lavender suit, with dark blonde hair pulled up in a bun. He couldn't see her face from his angle, but she stood looking at Scion without apparent fear.

 _ **DESTINATION?**_

Eidolon stumbled. Around him, other capes collapsed or clutched at their heads. Even Glaistig Uaine looked pained. A tear ran down her cheek as she stared.

" **Rest."** The woman's voice… _hurt._ Just like the mental blast from presumably Scion that made their brains rattle in their skulls, the woman's voice made their ears burn. Eidolon switched his enhanced hearing to a brute ability.

 _ **ALONE.**_

An impossible amount of meaning echoed though the signal that Eidolon's brain interpreted as a word. It wasn't a word, though. It was thought and feeling and pain and a cacophony of sensations that brought tears to his eyes.

" **Peace."**

Like the mental barrage, the audible barrage of the woman's voice carried more meaning than any one word could carry. In Eidolon's mind he sensed ideas of rest and company and contentment.

Whole libraries of information was being passed between the two beings below that Eidolon, even with all his powers, could never have comprehended. Around the two, Bailey and five women stood still, as if waiting.

 _ **REJECTION.**_

Pain and anguish. Loss and rage. A longing for something beyond comprehension of reach.

" **Acceptance."**

Welcome and love and forgiveness.

Scion dropped his arms, his expression still confused.

 _ **AGREEMENT.**_

" **Agreement."**

Abruptly the sky over their heads dimmed. Eidolon fell back and felt his stomach drop.

"Oh fuck me," Glory Girl whispered.

Glaistig Uaine wept.

The sun was blotted out by a giant cloud of scintillating, impossible shapes all folding into each other.

"Oh God, I recognize that," Glory Girl whispered.

"It is our father, the god of the fairy, as he truly exists," Glaistig whispered. "I have seen him in my dreams."

Eidolon knew that all natural triggers had visions of the seemingly infinite creature that covered the sky from horizon to horizon. Abruptly, though, there was an impossible flash of silver light, and it was gone.

He focused his vision back to the woman. She stood with her hand out, and floating above the palm of her hand was a scintillating creature that looked like a tiny version of what just covered the sky.

The woman turned around, and at last Eidolon could see her face—attractive, with a beauty mark. She actually reminded him of an actress he saw once in one of Bo Derek's racier films.

She was looking at Harry with a sad smile.

" **Thank you, Harry. It was good seeing you again. Have a good life, my love.** "

Abruptly she was gone. Harry and the five women around him collapsed like puppets with cut strings and the strange, awesome pressure that pressed against Eidolon's brain ended.

"Let's get down there and see if they need help," he declared.

"Wait!" Glory Girl found her voice. "Is that it? Is it over?"

"It is," Glaistig said. "The play…it's over. All was…for nothing?" She rose into the air. "I must…think on this."

She popped away, borne by one of the shades of her stolen power. Eidolon switched to his own teleportation and popped down to the plaza. He quickly knelt by Bailey and slapped the man's face.

"Bailey, are you alright?"

The man opened his eyes, to reveal a different shade of green than what Eidolon knew.

"Harry Bailey's…not here," the man said. He picked himself off the ground. "I'm Potter, Harry Potter." Rather than linger by Eidolon, Potter moved to the nearest woman, Hebert. He passed a hand over her face and she woke instantly.

"What's your name?"

The woman stared up at Potter with adoration. "It's me, Harry. I don't understand it, but…it's me. Hermione!"

He rushed to Wilbourn and woke her the same as Hebert—Hermione. "What's your name?"

Lisa took a very un-Lisa breathe, shuddering as she did so. "Luna. My name is Luna. Harry, you look so young. And…oh, what nice breasts I have. What happened?"

"Give me a sec and we'll find out." He moved to Schneider and repeated the process. "Name."

The young woman blushed prettily. "Um, Stephanie. There was someone with me, Susan? She said…something about not enough space? I didn't understand it."

"That's okay," Potter assured her. He then knelt down next to Laborn, who had woken on her own.

"It's me, Aisha," she said. "That chick Daphne couldn't handle a real woman's body."

Potter snorted and looked at Contessa. She, like the others, stood. "My given name was Fortuna. Ginny sends her love."

Harry looked back at Hebert and Wilbourn, who called themselves Hermione and Luna. "Why just you two?"

Hermione shrugged, then walked over, and wrapped Taylor Hebert's arms around his neck, and kissed him so hard even _Eidolon_ blushed.

"Who knows?" Hermione said. "All I know is that we're alive. We're together. And that I love you, Harry Potter."

The others crowded around him, and Eidolon decided he had other duties to attend to.

~~Forever~~

~~Forever~~

Harry Bailey work with a startled scream. That brought Taylor up beside him, which made him realize she was naked, and beautiful. Of course, she was always beautiful, but her being naked made everything better, including how beautiful she was.

On the other side of the bed, Lisa sat up. Her pixie hair was tousled, and she had a drop of drool at the corner of her mouth, and she was also naked. And beautiful. Like Taylor, her being naked was even _more_ beautiful.

"What the fuck just happened," Lisa said. "Why am I naked? Where are my pajamas? Why…my power." She gasped. "My power. Fuck, Taylor! Harry, my power's gone! What the fuck happened…?"

The lamp on the far side of the room turned into a bird that hooted and took two circles around the room before returning and transforming back into a lamp. Lisa rose up on her knees, gloriously naked. She was concerned, so Harry fought the urge to touch.

"What the fuck was that?"

"Felt like accidental magic," Harry said.

Taylor rolled out of bed, moved to the center of the floor, and closed her eyes. "I can't feel any bugs at all," she said softly. "But…I feel something. Harry, but also…"

Harry blinked, and looked from Taylor to Lisa and back again.

"You're witches," he said, voicing the only thought that came to mind. "Like all of Potter's brides. I was dead, and you were consumed, but how…how…"

Abruptly they were not alone. A woman stood in the middle of the floor. She was beautiful, blonde with an oval face enhanced by a beauty mark on the lower left corner of her mouth. Harry remembered her from his memories.

"Amanda," he breathed.

She smiled at Taylor, then Lisa, before she stepped to Harry and leaned down until they were eye-to-eye.

"Hello, Harry Bailey."

He drifted to his feet; Taylor and Lisa on either side. "You're…we…did we win?"

"Scion is gone," Amanda said. "At peace. Now that I have been summoned, I can undo this terrible mistake, and no more worlds have to suffer for my sin. And I could only do it because of you. Thank you, Harry. And you, Taylor, and you, Lisa."

"We were…dead," Taylor whispered.

Amanda smiled at them all. "Then consider this your _deus ex machina_ ending. After all, I _am_ God. And this? This is your well-deserved happy ending. Make the most of it."

Abruptly she was gone, which left Harry standing between a naked Taylor and a naked Lisa. More importantly, he could _feel_ them in a way he never could before. He could feel their burgeoning magic rubbing sensually against his own, and he could feel their desire rising.

"Did God just set us up as a threesome?" Lisa said, flabbergasted.

"I think so," Taylor said.

"God is great," he said with a grin that threatened to split his face in half. "And I'm pretty sure the monorail is still working."

Lisa made a show of thinking about it, one hand to her chin, while very deliberately elevating her perfectly pert breasts in the crook of an arm.

"I don't know, that's asking a lot. What would we get in return?"

"My everlasting love and affection?"

"That was worth just seeing us naked together," Taylor pointed.

"I'll clean the toilets for a month!"

"You can do that with a spell, Harry," Lisa pointed out. "Hell, once we learn how, we'll be able to do that too. Do better."

"Unlimited foot rubs for the rest of your lives," Harry said. His grin turned sappy and he could feel his eyes getting moist again. "Unlimited neck and back rubs for the rest of your lives. Unlimited tickle fests and food and love and kids and anything and everything either of you could ever ask of me or that I could ever give you is yours. Forever and always, amen!"

Lisa looked to Taylor, who returned her gaze with a slow, steady nod.

"Okay," Lisa said.

Harry gaped. "Really? I mean, now, really?"

She took his hand, as naked as the day she was born, and pulled Taylor close by too.

"Are you going to stand there talking, or are you going to teleport us to your stupid monorail so you can have your wanton way with us?"

"Oh, fuck…"

The three disappeared before he finished speaking. Their door opened and Harry Potter walked in with Hermione and Luna both holding his hand while wearing Taylor and Lisa's faces.

"This will work," Hermione said. She kicked the door closed and started stripping with desperate urgency. "It's been billions of years since we made love you to, Harry Potter. You'd damned well be worth the wait!"

~Finis~

* * *

A/N: I thought about an epilogue, but the truth is this just seemed the best place to finish it. And before you start screaming, "But..but...you said no harems!", I said Harry Bailey would not have a harem.

I never said Potter wouldn't.

Plus, if I'm honest, I've always, ALWAYS _,_ wanted to do a literally divine _deus ex machina_ ending.

Thank you all for your support and for reading. Happy New Year 2019.


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